


thinking 'bout jumping in instead

by Belgium



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Banter, M/M, Minor Injuries, like a 8:2 ratio of banter to substance, the slowest of burns, two dummies and their slightly less dumb BFFs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-18 02:45:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14844143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Belgium/pseuds/Belgium
Summary: “It’s like what I always say,” Donghyuck interrupts with an unbelievable bravado that tells Jeno he has never once said what was about to come out of his mouth. “Fellas, it’s totally not weird and actuallysupermanly to kiss your bros. Just guys being dudes, dudes being guys, you know?”Or: Jeno falls, literally and metaphorically, for his best friend Jaemin.





	thinking 'bout jumping in instead

**Author's Note:**

  * For [riveting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/riveting/gifts).



> surprise dea, love you ♡ this is my first time writing NCT so i hope i did them even the tiniest bit of justice ahh
> 
> !!!: jeno has a minor fracture that occurs 100% off-screen. nothing squeamish is depicted/described. there are mentions of aches here and there but don't delve into detail. also, pls suspend your disbelief about the setting! there's no specification but my americanisms def got the best of me

> “Sometimes I think gravity may be death in disguise. Other times I think gravity is love, which is why love’s only demand is that we fall.”  
>  — _We Are the Ants_ , Shaun David Hutchinson

 

When Jeno stopped to think about it, the human body really was incredible. Just last winter Jaemin couldn’t even get out of bed without groaning about his back as if he had the musculoskeletal system of an eighty-year-old, and now here he was, one leg flung over the arm of the chair like he had suddenly inherited the hospital after a year’s worth of physical therapy, his face entirely too close to Jeno’s for comfort.

“I can’t breathe,” whines Jeno, breaking their prolonged eye contact. “You’re using up all my oxygen.”

“Code blue, all emergency personnel to room 223, all emergency personnel to room 223,” Jaemin sing-songs, mimicking the intercom system. “Patient suffering respiratory arrest. I repeat: patient suffering—”

“Oh, I’m suffering alright.” Jeno manages a halfhearted scowl. “Is that what they really say over the PA?”

Jaemin shrugs. “Who knows? I’m not a doctor, I’m just the Prince of PT.”

“Some prince you are. Look at the way you’re sitting.”

“What’s wrong with the way I’m sitting? It’s called body language, and my body is saying that I’m comfortable.” He honest-to-God pouts at him. “How about you look at the way you’re sitting? You look so sad.”

Jaemin has a point, even if Jeno technically wasn’t sitting. He had been lying supine with his broken leg suspended in a sling for only a few hours, but it seemed as though he had been there for days. It was a special sort of agony. Every part of his body either itched or ached or throbbed or straight up hurt, and the fracture in his fibula seemed like it was on both fire and ice.

“Do you remember what happened?” Jaemin asks, peering cautiously at him, invading Jeno’s personal space again—not that Jaemin had ever once bothered with personal space in their years of friendship, anyway. If it weren’t for his leg, Jeno knew that Jaemin would have been clambering into the hospital bed the second he burst through the door.

“Kind of. Not really. Everything’s all a jumbled mess.” Jeno scrunches up his nose, deep in thought. “Why am I picturing rollerblades?”

He winces. “Uh, there may or may not have been rollerblades involved.”

“So I’ll take that as a yes.”

“You can take it however you’d like,” Jaemin says liltingly, raising his eyebrows up and down.

“I’ll take the truth with a side of truth with some extra truth to-go, please.”

He huffs. “Fine, Je-lock Holmes. We were rollerblading home from the river and some guy lost control of his car and came swerving at us. You pushed me out of the way and took the hit instead.” Jaemin bats his lashes at him and laces his hands over his heart and coos, “My hero.”

“No wonder I feel like I got run over by a bus,” Jeno grumbles, but smiles at him anyway.

“It was a Prius, Romeo, not a bus. It wasn’t even a cool car.” He considers something. “Je-meo? Ro-je-o? No, wait—Ro-jeno.” Jaemin shakes his head. “Never mind.”

Jeno ignores his feeble attempts at wordplay and says, “You know, being environmentally conscious is pretty lit.”

“ _Lit_ , he says,” Jaemin teases, snorting a little.

Jeno ignores him entirely and wriggles the toes on his unbroken leg. “What happened to my rollerblades?”

“Hey.” Jaemin unsprawls from the chair and leans over, placing a grave, gentle hand on Jeno’s chest. Jeno thinks he must’ve been hit harder than he thought for his chest to ache so throbbingly at such a tender touch. “The most important thing, Jeno, is that you’re still alive. Let’s celebrate the little things in life, right?”

Jeno eyes him with deep-seated suspicion.

“They had to cut the rollerblades off from my feet, didn’t they,” he postulates slowly.

“The most important thing,” Jaemin reiterates cheerfully, “is that you’re still alive. The little things.”

“Oh _no_ , Nana,” he moans, sinking further into the uncomfortable hospital bed. His subconscious was either trying to melt into the floor or smother himself to death with the pillows à la Desdemona. “Injun is really going to kill me.” He pauses. “Wait, why is my life considered a little thing?”

Jaemin pretends not to hear him.

The rollerblades were a present from Renjun for Jeno’s seventeenth birthday, after Jeno had complained for weeks about how he was still a year away from being able to get his license. Renjun had grinned and said, “Here, Jeno. I got you your own wheels, since you don’t seem to appreciate the value of public transportation.”

“Wow, thanks! How come you didn’t get me a bike instead?”

His grin had morphed into a scowl so quickly that it should’ve been considered a scientific miracle. Jeno had very wisely ducked before Renjun could suffocate him in a chokehold.

“You must have actually lost your mind, Jeno Lee. Why would I ever buy you a bike in this lifetime?”

“Because we’re birthday bros?” he had tried weakly.

“We are not birthday bros. We have never been birthday bros.”

“We’re friends?” Jeno tried again.

“Are you crazy? I’m no one’s friend,” Renjun had said. They had all been best friends since middle school so that was a flat out lie, but it went unquestioned to absolutely no one’s surprise. “Do you even know how much a bike costs? Do I look like I’m made out of money? How about I just buy you a brand new car next year, huh? Might as well, since we’re on that trajectory. What about the year after that, your own space shuttle?”

“A space shuttle,” Donghyuck had repeated, choking with laughter. “Injun really is unstoppable.”

“While we’re at it, why don’t I just buy you a one-year warranty on those rollerblades—”

“Thank you very much, Injun, no warranty necessary,” Jeno had recited obediently. “I will treasure and guard these rollerblades with my life and promise to take super awesome good care of them forever and ever for as long as I live and pass them down to my kids and then my kids will pass them down to their own kids and the cycle will repeat until the sun explodes and all life on Earth disintegrates,” he had finished all in one breath. “Amen.”

Famous last words.

“Here lies Jeno, RIP. He beat death by car but was beaten to death by Huang Renjun,” Jaemin eulogizes, his mischievous smile no help at all. “In an hospital, no less. How does anyone get murdered in a hospital? You’d think it’d be impossible.”

“Any cause of death is possible when you’re friends with Injun.”

“True.” Jaemin suddenly laughs. “Although you know what they say: Injun is the Neville Chamberlain of friends.”

Jeno scrunches his nose in bewilderment. “Literally what the hell is that even supposed to mean?”

“Appeasement is the only policy,” he explains, exaggeratedly slow, like Jeno should’ve known this already.

“Ha ha,” Jeno intones. “Very clever. Who taught you that?”

Jaemin sulks prettily. “Why? You don’t think I’m smart enough to have come up with that on my own?”

Jeno has seen Jaemin’s abysmal grades in World History and doesn’t even bother dignifying his question with a relevant response. “Was it Mark-hyung? I bet it was Mark-hyung.”

“I don’t know,” Jaemin teases. “Was it DJ Marky Mark?”

“Oh. Donghyuck, then.”

“Duh. Who else could have crafted a burn so loaded that you need to look it up in the index of a social studies textbook to truly understand the full weight of it?”

“Lots to unpack here,” he agrees. “But if you actually paid attention in class, you wouldn’t need to look it up.”

Their banter naturally peters out, and Jaemin, instead of a reply, just scoots the chair closer to him and folds his arms on top of the bedrail. He rests his chin on his forearms and smiles sweetly up at Jeno.

“Maybe that’s not what I wanna pay attention to,” he finally says, still beaming.

Jeno can’t help but smile back.

It belatedly occurs to Jeno that maybe it—this, the entire situation—should’ve been a little bit horrible. But it somehow wasn’t, even though Jeno is sure that he looks ghastly, with his excess adrenaline and sweat-matted fringe and what might be the beginnings of a black eye, judging by the way his left eye pulses in tandem with his heart rate. Jaemin doesn’t look too much better, a semi-permanent stress crease in between his eyebrows, although somehow his hair was still perfectly coiffed. Unbelievable, but on brand.

“You know what’s funny?” Jaemin says. “And it’s not my face,” he adds at the exact same time Jeno says, “Your face.”

He scowls and flicks Jeno on the forehead.

“You’re _so_ clever. I was gonna say that it’s funny that this is the first time all year that we hang out together and you get hit by a car.”

“Very funny,” Jeno deadpans, gesturing at his suspended leg with one hand and rubbing at his aching forehead with the other. “What do you mean, the first time? We’ve been hanging out all the time since you got better.”

Jaemin’s gaze flickers downward.

“Well, I mean, just you and me. It’s not the same anymore, you know? Like, I love Donghyuck and Injun, too, but…” He winks at Jeno. “Who needs them when I have you?”

“You’re so gross,” Jeno laughs, swatting lightly at his arm.

Jaemin lets himself get swatted, and the strange wrinkle in the atmosphere instantly irons itself out the second Jeno’s hand brushes against his skin. He keeps his hand there, fingers sweeping back and forth absentmindedly.

The sheer proximity of their bodies suddenly hits him—Jaemin hanging off his hospital throne, Jeno curled up against the edge of the bed, their hands touching. It was kind of odd, but it was also kind of nice, too, just the two of them, quietly breathing against the dim hum of the electric monitors, even with the way Jeno’s hip is slowly going numb from a mystery lump in the mattress that he doesn’t really want to think about.

“So,” Jeno eventually says, “when’s the calvary coming in?”

“I haven’t actually told them yet, but I will. You actually wanna get murdered?” Jaemin asks amusedly, fishing out his phone. “Injun might actually feel bad once he sees your leg, but Donghyuck will probably strangle you for getting hurt. Here, I’ll text them right now.”

He frowns. “No, I don’t want to make them worry. I’m fine now.”

“Your leg is broken,” Jaemin protests incredulously. “I wouldn’t call that fine.”

“Can’t you hold off for tonight? I’ll tell them tomorrow.”

“I don’t get it. Why don’t just do it now? Look, it’ll just take two seconds.”

Jeno can’t quite explain his hesitation. “I don’t know. I’ll just… I’ll tell them tomorrow,” he repeats lamely.

Jaemin hums. “Well, fine, I won’t do it, Jeno Lee,” he says unhurriedly.

“Oh, cool,” drawls Jeno, skeptical. “Very generous of you. Thanks.”

Jaemin grins. “For a price, that is.”

They were still close enough, touching, that Jeno didn’t even need to reach out to swat him on the arm again. “What do you want, Nana?”

Impossibly, his grin broadens even more. Not even Donghyuck, the Devil himself, was capable of looking so impish. “Oh, you know me, I would never ask for much.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Really!”

Jeno squints.

“I just want a kiss,” Jaemin demands loftily.

Jeno’s immediate gut reaction is to freeze. This is exactly what he does, because judging by the way he got his broken leg, he is nothing if not a slave to his instincts. What Jeno doesn’t plan for, however, is the fact that he also unexpectedly and very violently chokes on his saliva, which is never a cute look on anyone, especially a sweaty, black-eyed, broken-legged eighteen-year-old.

It’s a vicious cycle. He coughs, which only makes him choke again, which in turn makes him cough more. With monumental effort, Jeno manages to wrench his eyes open to peak at Jaemin, who somehow looked incredibly concerned and like he might have been weeping with laughter at the same time.

“What are your eyebrows doing?” Jeno squeezes out between multiple coughing fits.

“I don’t know! Do you need Heimlich or something?”

Jeno wheezes one last time and wills his breathing calm. He holds a finger up to Jaemin’s face.

“Don’t touch me, you chaotic heathen.”

“I’d hate to be the bearer of bad news but if you were trying to hurt me by calling me a heathen, try again,” Jaemin says, “because I know and accept myself.”

Jeno rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “That’s exactly what a heathen would say.”

Jaemin puckers his lips in response. Jeno rather thinks he looks like a blowfish.

Something funny happens then.

 _How about you go and kiss yourself_ , he almost says, which was physiologically impossible, so he doesn’t. His head goes to _Isn’t this just basically prostitution?_ and is about to voice it—even though it would imply that he was the hooker in this situation—but his throat catches on thin air, and Jeno’s mouth says without any conscious input from his brain, “Okay.”

Jaemin raises his eyebrows. “Okay what?”

“Uh,” follows up Jeno.

“God, you’re so eloquent,” teases Jaemin.

“Okay, I’ll give you a kiss,” he blurts out but doesn’t understand why.

Jaemin pulls back from their orbit, his face unreadable.

“Jeno,” is all he says, neither warning nor wanting.

Gingerly and wordlessly, Jeno straightens, pushing up on his elbows, being careful to not jostle his aching leg. He hesitantly places the weight of his hand on Jaemin’s nape, thumb brushing up against his hair, and chases after their gravitational pull.

This close, all Jeno can see and hear and feel is Jaemin—his half-closed downward eyes, the hypnotic, rhythmic tide of his still-water-running-deep breaths, the burden of his gravity. He was being very careful, Jeno realizes, to not look up at him, like he was trying to shut him out. What a foreign feeling it was, to not be a part of Jaemin’s trajectory.

Riding a sudden wave of courage, Jeno surges in and plants a kiss on Jaemin’s cheek with more tenderness than he intended. He can feel the way Jaemin’s surprised face lights up under his lips. By the time he pulls away, Jaemin is openly laughing at him, and he can trace the fire from his fibula radiating all the way up to his heart, flushing towards his face.

“Don’t laugh. Stop laughing. Why are you laughing?” Jeno grumbles, shoving his shoulder lightly.

“I’m not laughing!” Jaemin insists blithely through snickers.

He groans, shaking his head. “It’s the morphine, Nana. My head’s one big cotton ball. I’m not thinking right.”

Jaemin leans back in his chair, pulling his warmth away. Their distance made it both easier and harder to breathe. “Sure, Jeno,” he says slyly, putting his phone away as promised. “It’s the morphine.”

“Well, you said you wanted a kiss!” Jeno asserts, embarrassed. “So I gave you one!”

“You’re kind of dumb,” Jaemin says but he’s smiling brightly at him, “but I guess you’re right. Can’t beat your logic there.”

So why does he feel like he had it all wrong?

 

*

 

“Because you’re kind of dumb, Jeno,” Donghyuck says matter-of-factly, not even bothering to look up from his statistics textbook.

“Thank you so much,” intones Jeno sarcastically, although the effect was somewhat ruined by how muffled his voice was from hiding his miserable face in his arms on the cafeteria table. “What did I do to deserve such amazing, supportive friends?”

No reply. He burrows free of his self-imprisonment and finds that neither Donghyuck nor Renjun were paying an ounce of attention to him, Donghyuck furiously muttering to himself and squinting at his book for a quiz they had next class. Renjun, on the other hand, had given up on cramming for the quiz completely and was instead doodling trees in the margins of his old homework assignments.

“Hey, nerds,” Jeno whines, “please pay attention to me or I’ll wilt.”

“Tell that to your straight A’s, you nerd,” Donghyuck counters, full of despair. “Maybe if you took stats with us you wouldn’t have all these problems about feelings and stuff.”

“Don’t listen to Donghyuck,” says Renjun sweetly, adding one last flower in his sketch of the river next to their school. “You’re not kind of dumb.”

“Really?” Jeno asks hopefully.

“Of course not. You’re actually dumb as hell,” he clarifies, punctuating each syllable by shaking his pencil at Jeno’s face.

“Nice,” acknowledges Donghyuck. The sound of their high five drowns out Jeno’s groan.

“Remember when you used to be the nice one, Injun?” Jeno ignores Donghyuck’s scoff of disbelief. “Like, remember when you guys used to just kind of passive aggressively ignore each other? Now I can’t go even one day without getting roasted by the two of you. Why can’t we go back?”

“We didn’t _passive aggressively_ ignore each other,” Donghyuck protests. “It was _active_. We are men of _action_.”

“We just didn’t have anything in common at first,” Renjun adds, “but then we found our shared passion of picking on you. So thank you, Jeno. We really owe it all to you.”

Jeno flicks a piece of lettuce at them. It misses and falls to the floor.

“Besides, everyone always wants what they can’t have,” Donghyuck platitudinizes. With one last hopeless look, he shoves the textbook back into his backpack and cups his chin patronizingly in his hands, inclining forward into Jeno’s personal space. “It’s like how I want an A in stats, but what a pipe dream, am I right? Now tell wise old Donghyuckie what’s ailing you, son.”

“You’re the youngest one here,” Jeno points out. Donghyuck just shrugs like it wasn’t his problem that he was born the latest, although Jeno supposes that he’s technically right.

Renjun frowns. “What, I’m not wise old Renjun?”

“Oh, you’re definitely old, alright. Compared to the rest of us, you’ve already got one foot in the grave. Maybe even both at this point,” Donghyuck ribs, risking Renjun’s signature chokehold. He only barely escapes.

“If Injun has one foot in the grave, then what does that make Mark-hyung?”

“Sweet, beautiful, helpless baby Mark,” eulogizes Donghyuck, dolefully tilting his head up to the ceiling as if he were asking God for strength. “Gone, but never forgotten.” He snickers at his own joke, then leans back toward the center of their table. “Seriously, what’s wrong? I haven’t seen you this down since that time Bongsikie got sick.”

Jeno hesitates at the weight of Donghyuck and Renjun’s stares, unsure of what to say. He had been afraid that would happen. Jaemin had been too busy working on some group project to eat with them all week, but now it was Friday and Jeno was running out of time before he was back with them. Still, he had no idea where to begin.

The problem with airing his grievances to Donghyuck and Renjun was that they both cared too much. As much as Donghyuck pretended that he only listened to Jeno’s problems for the gossip, he really did care about the emotional and physical well-being of his friends. On the other hand, Renjun believed wholeheartedly in the power of a good cry and a long rooftop conversation about feelings—ideally during a sunset, after a fight with lots of shouting and weeping, and ending with a session of soul-searching stargazing. Just thinking about an honest heart-to-heart filled Jeno with misery.

“Just so you know, I don’t even know what’s wrong with me,” Jeno prefaces as a disclaimer, “so there will not be a single emotion discussed today. I’m talking to you, Huang Renjun.”

Renjun looks affronted. “Who, me? This is lunch, not the Spanish Inquisition,” he huffs.

“What do you mean you don’t know what’s wrong with you? Everything is wrong with you, Jeno,” Donghyuck supplies helpfully.

Jeno flicks another piece of lettuce at them. It hits Donghyuck squarely on the chin.

“Please no, not the moneymaker!” he squawks indignantly.

“I don’t want know what kind of money you’re making and how,” Jeno pleads.

“People actually pay you not to show them your face?” asks Renjun.

“It’s called being an entrepreneur. I’m a small business owner,” Donghyuck insists. He rubs his face absentmindedly. “Whatever. If you don’t want to share with the class, that’s fine, but please don’t look so mopey. It’s the weekend.”

“ _Almost_ the weekend,” Jeno corrects.

“Right, we still have to go and fail our stats quiz next hour,” Renjun reminds Donghyuck.

Donghyuck scrunches his nose. “Injun is the worst person to be in a class with,” he says to Jeno, who nods vehemently in agreement. Renjun was just one of those people who was naturally good at school. It was a gross injustice. “He’s always getting my hopes up that we’ll bomb together but I just end up flunking alone every time.”

Renjun shrugs. “I always ask you if you want to study with me but you keep turning me down, so it’s not my fault. Studying is free, you know.”

“Yes,” Donghyuck bemoans, “but at what cost?”

He laughs and lightly slaps Donghyuck’s arm. “I just said it was free.”

Donghyuck hums as if he didn’t quite agree, then turns to Jeno. “Speaking of free, Mopey, I’m gonna start charging you on Venmo if you keep making me and Injun play therapist.”

“ _Mopey_ ,” Jeno grumbles, then sighs, bonelessly sprawling over on the cafeteria table, despite not knowing what else has been on there. “Ugh, I don’t know. I guess, I’m just like…” He makes a vague hand gesture, grasping for the words. “I’m just confused. Wait, no, that’s not right. I guess—I’m not confused, but then I confused myself, and now that’s confusing me, because I don’t think I should be confused. So that’s all confusing.”

“Now _I’m_ confused,” Renjun says, squinting at him.

Donghyuck, though, scoffs. “What are you so confused about, Mopey? Here’s what I got: Jaemin asked you for a kiss.”

Jeno nods.

“And then you gave him a kiss.”

He nods again.

“A kiss that he asked for.”

Another hesitant nod.

“That you gave him.”

Jeno frowns.

“See? Pretty black and white to me. I say this case is closed. Detective Hyuckie out.”

“Yes, but…” Jeno stops. “But, like… Donghyuck, but—”

“ _Yes, but, but, like, Donghyuck, but_ —but what? It’s like what I always say,” Donghyuck interrupts with an unbelievable bravado that tells Jeno he has never once said what was about to come out of his mouth. “Fellas, it’s totally not weird and actually _super_ manly to kiss your bros. Just guys being dudes, dudes being guys, you know? Look, I’ll even prove it—come here, Jeno.”

Jeno blanches and moves to jerk away, but Donghyuck swoops in like a hawk torpedoing for its prey, planting a smooch on his forehead before he could escape.

“Aargh!” he exclaims, rubbing desperately at his forehead.

“Sorry I’m not Jaemin,” Donghyuck says, clearly not sorry at all. He turns to Renjun. “Injun—”

“Don’t kiss me,” Renjun warns, brandishing his fork like a sword.

Donghyuck flutters his eyelashes at him, maneuvers expertly around the fork as if he had prior experience with dodging weapons that were wielded against his smothering affection, and kisses Renjun’s cheek with an exaggerated smooch. Renjun looks equal parts exasperated and grudgingly amused, but not at all surprised.

“I just wanna love you, Injunie.”

“Go love someone else,” Renjun replies.

“I just need somebody to lo-o-ove,” Donghyuck sings to the tune of Justin Bieber.

“I _said_ , go love someone _else!_ ”

Something about his friends being ridiculous with each other almost melts Jeno’s ice cold cinderblock heart, except—

“Hey, what do you mean, ‘sorry I’m not Jaemin’?” demands Jeno belatedly.

Donghyuck snorts. “Why, did I stutter?” He hoists his backpack up one shoulder and stands. “Sorry, kids, but I gotta stop by my locker before class. See you in fifteen,” he says to Renjun. To Jeno, he adds, “I’ll see _you_ once you’ve stopped being a dummy. So, never, I guess.”

With a hearty cackle, he slinks out of the cafeteria, leaving Jeno and Renjun to exchange entertained looks.

“You know, Jeno, you’re not _really_ dumb,” Renjun says when they finally shuffle to class together. He examines Jeno, tilting his head a little. “Maybe a little emotionally stunted, sure, but at least you’re not completely stupid.”

“Is it bad that I’m oddly flattered?” Jeno asks, grinning.

“Wow, you really need to get better friends,” Renjun teases. “Here, let me take your bag.”

It was difficult adjusting to how slow the crutches made him when he was just trying to get around a hallway. It had been only a week and a half but Jeno was already over how sluggishly he moved, even though he logically knew it couldn’t be helped. So far Donghyuck and Renjun had traded off days helping him actually get to class on time. Jeno hated feeling like a burden, but they had both refused to hear it and just bulldozed through his protests like they always did.

Even harder was sitting still. Everything was driving him insane—the way his cast itched like the Devil, how it was impossible to find a comfortable way to lay down without aggravating the throb in his leg, the fact that he couldn’t do track in his final year or go on after-school runs and bike rides and rollerblade sessions (Renjun was still prickly about this) with Jaemin anymore.

And _Jaemin_. Jaemin drove Jeno a different kind of crazy.

Before he could think about it too much, they arrive at Jeno’s chemistry classroom. Renjun gently transfers Jeno’s bag back onto his shoulder and pulls out a chair for him.

“For you, m’lady,” Renjun proclaims with panache.

“I hate you,” Jeno informs him. He sits down anyway.

“Why? I just want the best for you, Jeno,” he insists with a straight face.

“You’ve been hanging out too much with Donghyuck. Please stop hanging out with him,” Jeno pretends to complain, which makes Renjun laugh brightly. “I hope Mark-hyung flunks out of college so badly that he has to repeat senior year, and then Donghyuck will finally stop grooming you into being the second worst person in the world.”

“I really don’t think that’s how college works,” Renjun says, amused. “Is Donghyuck the first worst person in the world?”

“Hey, you said it, not me,” Jeno says. “I’ll remember you always when he eradicates you from this universe.”

Renjun pushes his shoulder lightly with a grin. “ _You’re_ the worst, Jeno. You’ll be the first one I haunt when I’m a ghost. I’ll meet you after school to walk you home, ‘kay?”

“‘Kay,” Jeno confirms, laughing when Renjun ruffles his hair and absentmindedly hums to himself as he heads for his own class.

 

*

 

Chem lab goes as well as it could for someone who technically had only one closed-toe shoe on (Jeno wasn’t sure the walking boot counted, but he also wasn’t sure if anyone was allowed to say anything to him) and world history goes reasonably fine, although Jeno couldn’t quite look Renjun in the eyes after remembering Jaemin’s (well, really, Donghyuck’s) appeasement joke when he went to pick him up.

By the time his last class was over, Jeno was exhausted from hopping around as if his healthy leg were a pogo stick. Worst of all, his armpits were sore from the crutches, which was the most ridiculous kind of pain. He manages to hobble to the bench outside of Renjun’s art class before his body tells him to give up.

Give up he does. Jeno flings his backpack to the ground, hoping his binders and notebooks were much sturdier than the crunching sound they made had indicated, and crumples face first onto the seat as if it were a bed with a groan.

A moment later, Renjun rounds the corner of his peripheral vision.

“You never told me if you failed your stats quiz or not,” Jeno says in lieu of a greeting, not even bothering to get up. He figures that Renjun would just haul him off the bench if he really wanted to go—Renjun was much more powerful than he looked, and Jeno and Donghyuck were the lucky ones who experienced his strength on a frequent basis. Getting hit by the car last week hurt but Renjun’s punches were on an entirely different level.

“I don’t take stats, dummy,” responds a voice that was full of mirth but very much did not belong to Renjun.

“Why has everyone been calling me a dummy lately?” Jeno whines.

Jaemin laughs and shoos Jeno over so that he can sit down with him. “Probably because you are one,” he posits. “How’s it going, champ?”

“My pits—”

“Stink,” supplies Jaemin.

“—hurt,” Jeno finishes, snorting. He scooches up the bench and props his head into Jaemin’s waiting lap. Automatically, Jaemin’s fingers run through his hair in gentle, ebbing waves, pulling him in like water lapping up against him in a pool. “What are you doing here? Come to point and laugh at a sad, injured person? I thought you have track today.”

Jaemin shrugs. “I do have track, but what do you know? I’m not there.”

“ _Jaemin_ ,” he scolds. “Coach Minho might murder you.”

“Too fast to live,” Jaemin says with a solemn face, “too young to die. Also, I have two more absences left, so I’m safe. Also, I would never point and laugh at any sad, injured person—just you. And _also_ , didn’t you get our texts?”

Jeno blinks. “You know damn well that I never check my phone.” He proves his point when he unlocks his phone to see a text out of the blue from Dongyoung in their group chat with Jungwoo, three unread messages from Renjun and Donghyuck in the group chat with the four of them, and a private text from Jaemin.

 

Dongyoung-hyung  
`Missing you angels today. Come visit soon!`

 

Injoong  
`Jeno! I’m sorry I actually can’t walk you home today :( super behind in studio art so I have to stay after school`

Injoong  
`unless… QUICK finish my project for me`

Fullsun  
`nooooo sorry Jeno I’d do it but I already had plans!!!`

 

Nana  
`where are you loser?`

 

“I’m right here,” Jeno answers. In response, Jaemin tugs playfully at a lock of hair. “You never answered my question.”

Jaemin hunches over Jeno’s face in his lap and sticks out his tongue. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m Prince Charming-ing you.”

“I’m not your Cinderella,” Jeno protests, reaching up to push Jaemin’s forehead. He pauses. “Wait, is that the right fairytale?”

“No idea,” he admits, “but if you _were_ Cinderella, Hyuck and Injun would definitely be the uggo stepsisters.”

Jeno grins. “Duh. Where’s my pumpkin coach?”

“Well… it’s my bike. I got a rear rack with your name written all over it.”

“Do you really now,” Jeno insinuates with a tone much braver than he felt, but groans immediately. “Ugh, now I sound like Donghyuck.”

They stare at each other in total silence for a moment. There was no injustice on Earth quite like Jaemin not looking even a little bit stupid from Jeno’s accidental-front-cam angle point of view.

“Oh!” Jaemin suddenly exclaims, laughing and wagging his brows. “I get it now. Rear rack.”

“Nice, Nana.”

Peeling himself off the bench takes him a minute but Jaemin helps him stand up, wordlessly handing him his crutches and shouldering Jeno’s backpack along with his own. It makes him look like he had two horrifying growths on his back, which Jeno supposes is only fitting—karma for having a perfect face.

“Oh, wow,” Jeno says dryly. “I love the double hunchback.”

“It’s called fashion,” Jaemin replies bravely, striking a pose.

Jeno laughs and gestures towards the arm room. “Wanna go say bye to Injun?”

None of them ever ventured into the art room if they could help it. Jeno wasn’t sure about Jaemin and Donghyuck’s reasons, but he stayed out of Renjun’s lair out of respect and a healthy dose of fear, which was also a great parallel for how their friendship operated. It always gave Renjun a great deal of anxiety when people breathed down his neck, especially when he was trying to concentrate. And if Jeno thought Renjun was scary with just his hands, he could only imagine the amount of irreversible destruction Renjun could wreak if he were armed with a paintbrush.

“Hey, how do you think Injun would kill us with a kiln?” wonders Jeno out loud, hobbling towards the art room. “Like, would he bake us inside one or would he lift the whole thing with his bare hands and crush us with it?”

Jaemin shrugs, opening the door for him. “I don’t know what it is about you guys but Injun’s always really nice to me.” He considers something. “Actually, I’ve never seen him try to strangle Mark-hyung, either. Maybe he really just hates you and Donghyuck.”

“Why would anyone want to mess with Mark-hyung?” asks Jeno, completely serious, squeezing through the doorway.

It takes a bit of tricky maneuvering but Jeno manages to round past the haphazard row of drying racks obstructing the view of the room from the entrance. Renjun sat in a brightly-lit corner of the studio, a large sheet of watercolor paper, overwhelmingly blank, in front of him.

Only he wasn’t alone. Nor was he working on his project at all—Donghyuck was doing a good job of distracting him with what looked like intense, hush-hush back-and-forth gossip at a breakneck speed, their heads knocked together. Donghyuck’s back was to Jeno, but he could see Renjun laughing at one of Donghyuck’s extravagant hand gestures.

“Hey!” blabs Jeno before he can help himself. The sudden noise startles them both and Donghyuck bumps his forehead into Renjun’s, which makes Renjun spill a portion of the water he was using to clean his brushes with. “What are you two doing here?”

“Us two? What are _you two_ doing here?” Renjun sputters.

“I’m here because I thought _you_ would be here!”

“I _am_ here!”

“Then what is _Donghyuck_ doing here?”

“ _Me?_ What are _you_ doing here, Jeno?”

“I _told_ you, I was waiting for Injun! Tell me what _you’re_ doing here!”

“Make me!” sing-songs Donghyuck. “What is _Jaemin_ doing here?”

“This is stressing me out,” says Jaemin, following their back and forth conversation as if he were watching a ping-pong tournament. “Uh—Jeno, what are _you_ doing here?”

“You’re supposed to be on my side, Jaemin,” Jeno says, laughing. “What are you working on, Injun?”

But instead of replying like the sane, trustworthy person he normally was, Renjun pales and whips his face towards Donghyuck, who stares blank-faced back at him. To an outsider, it would have seemed that Donghyuck had no idea what was going on, but Jeno had been friends with him long enough to know that he only looked like that when he was truly panicking.

Very suspicious indeed.

“I’m, uh. Just, you know. Working on some art,” Renjun eventually flounders.

“Some art,” Jeno repeats slowly.

“Yes! You know me! I love painting!” he exclaims like he had actually lost his mind.

Donghyuck snaps out of his hysterical daze and swoops in. “Okay, sorry, guys, you caught us.” He adds a sheepish chortle for good measure, but it doesn’t fly past Jeno’s bullshit detector for a second. “I’m Injunie’s muse for his project but he was too embarrassed to admit it. Weird, I know. Why would anyone be ashamed to be inspired by a beautiful angel like me?”

Renjun kicks him under the table and he yelps.

“Oh,” says Jaemin, nodding sagely. “So is that why you texted—”

“Yes,” interrupts Renjun.

To Donghyuck, he says, “And is that why you told me—”

“Shut up,” Donghyuck blurts out, but his tone didn’t hold any heat.

“Your painting looks pretty empty,” Jeno notes cautiously, peering at the unfinished sketch. “Almost like you didn’t actually have an assignment and were just dicking around after school with Donghyuck.”

“I told you, I’m really behind,” insists Renjun.

“Uh-huh. What’s the theme of the assignment?”

“Portraits,” Renjun answers the same time Donghyuck grasps for straws and says, “Cubism.”

The glare Renjun shoots him would’ve eviscerated a lesser man.

“Cubist portraits,” Jaemin says, puzzled.

“Why?” Renjun demands. “You uncultured swines never heard of my homie, my man, my bro Pablo Picasso before?”

With that final odd outburst, Renjun finally comes to his senses and chases Jeno and Jaemin laughing out of the classroom with a loaded paintbrush, threatening to get paint all over their clothes if they didn’t leave. Though, with all things considered, it was a relatively slow-speed chase, since he was accounting for Jeno’s leg.

Maybe even _too_ slow… almost as if Renjun’s scare tactics were all show and he wanted to make sure they didn’t come back.

“Don’t you think they were being super weird?” Jeno asks Jaemin when they’ve hobbled to the bike racks outside their school.

Jaemin just shrugs as he goes to unlock his bike, a garish, glaringly red monstrosity Jeno remembers Jaemin having since middle school. “Those two have always been kind of weird.” He pockets his key and examines the bike, hiking up their two backpacks on his shoulders. “How do we do this?”

“I get that Donghyuck has always been kind of weird, but Injun is usually a sensible person,” reasons Jeno, hopping next to Jaemin’s side to examine the bike for himself. “Why would they sneak around after school together alone like that?”

“Because they’re friends?” Jaemin points out.

Jeno bulldozes right through it. “No, it just doesn’t make any sense. Besides, when was the last time Injun was ever behind on an assignment?”

As he continues to thinks out loud, Jaemin adjusts the backpacks so that they both sat in front of his stomach, like two oversized fanny packs. Jeno stifles a laugh as Jaemin eventually settles on the seat. “I think this’ll work.” He pats the rear rack with a wink. “Come on, hop up. I’ll take your crutches. You can hold me like we’re in _Titanic_.”

Jaemin pedals languidly, steering with one hand and cradling the crutches with the other as Jeno wriggles around, finally finding a comfortable position. He ends up sliding his arm underneath the backpacks to wrap around Jaemin’s middle and resting his cheek on Jaemin’s broad shoulder.

It was still chilly for late spring but the warmth of Jaemin’s body seeps through the layers of both their clothes. Things look different from this perspective, Jeno thinks, as he watches the familiar sun-dappled houses and streets he’s walked past for the last four years zip by him.

Craning his neck, he sneaks a glance at Jaemin, quiets his head, then hugs him in tighter. He thinks he knows why he does it but is too afraid to voice it, even in his thoughts. But Jaemin lights up—subtly, such a tiny shift in his expression that Jeno was afraid that if he so much as blinked it would fade away, but his gleaming face made his heart bloom then ebb, and radiate then vanish, his lungs breathing in and condensing everything until his chest felt like it would burst.

Oh. Maybe—no. Oh, no, wait—

“ _Oh my god_ , Nana,” Jeno exclaims, startling Jaemin, which causes him to sharply jerk the bike to the left. Jeno almost falls off but clings tighter just in time. “What if Hyuck and Injun are secretly dating?”

Jaemin gags. “ _No_ ,” is all he manages. “No way. What?”

“Yes! That’s why they were doing such a bad job at being sneaky!” Jaemin whips his head back to stare at Jeno, who laughs at his slack-jawed expression. “And that totally explains why Injun lied and made up that flimsy excuse about his art project and why he didn’t want to take me home. Injun would never lie to me—he’s so bad at it—but we walked in on their date. Their _secret date_ , because they have a _secret relationship_. Hey, keep your eyes on the road.”

Jaemin pouts but turns back as requested. “You’re right, I should be more careful. I have precious cargo,” he agrees mischievously.

Jeno is glad no one can witness what he is afraid is his face actually catching on fire.

“You know, I guess it makes sense,” Jaemin finally concedes after a moment deep in thought. “I saw Injun in the hallway after lunch today and he kept squinting at me like I had something on my face. So I asked him about it and then he panicked and said, ‘Hypothetically, how do you know if someone you hypothetically know hypothetically has a crush on someone else you know, hypothetically?’”

“Oh my god. _Oh my god._ What did you say?”

“He ran away before I could say anything! And Donghyuck and I have world history together, right? Well, the entire time he kept dropping really obvious hints that he couldn’t help you today because he was meeting someone after school but wouldn’t say who. It drove me insane. And when I suggested asking Injun to help you, he got so prickly and cranky about it so I didn’t push it, and then he convinced me to skip track to give you a lift. I think they just wanted us both out of their hair.”

Jeno frowns. “Donghyuck manipulated you into playing hooky to help his love life? That’s kind of a dick move.”

“Nah, it’s not a hassle or anything. Remember how last year when I was in PT you kept complaining that track was no fun because you only had Jisung? Now I’m on the other side and track is no fun at all without you,” Jaemin says, shrugging. “I miss you. I wouldn’t trade hanging out with you for anything in the world.”

For a moment, Jeno has no idea what to say until he realizes that the only thing he can do is tell the truth. “I miss you too,” he echoes, nuzzling into Jaemin’s neck. “And I wouldn’t trade anything for you, either.”

It takes a while to dismount the rear rack when they arrive at Jeno’s house but Jaemin carefully supports him until he stops wobbling on his one foot. Despite his halfhearted protests, Jaemin walks him all the way to the driveway and up the porch. Jeno unlocks the front door and looks back at him.

Their eyes meet. For a moment, everything around them goes blank except the warm arc of Jaemin’s smile.

“Thanks, Nana,” Jeno says quietly. “I really mean it.”

“Sure thing,” replies Jaemin. “You know I’m always there for you, Jeno Lee.”

A crazy thought takes a hold of Jeno’s brain then. He takes a step closer to Jaemin and thinks, _Why not?_

“So, Donghyuck told me something at lunch today,” he begins slowly.

Jaemin says nothing but leans in a little, raising his eyebrows in interest.

“He said that, uh,” Jeno continues hesitantly, “that kisses are totally not weird and actually super manly. Or something. Um, you know how he is. So…”

He steels himself and swoops in, kissing Jaemin gently on the cheek, then jolts back as if he were struck by lightning.

“Okay great that was for the ride thank you so much Nana I really mean it sorry this is all Hyuck’s fault so fight him if you’re mad but please don’t be mad at him or at me because that would be kind of horrible um okay bye see you on Monday thank you bye thanks!” he rattles off all in one breath.

With that, Jeno _hurls_ himself into the house and slams the door behind him at an ungodly speed for a person with only one wholly functioning leg, a backpack that weighed as much as a small toddler, and two ungainly crutches.

Safely back inside, he brushes his fingers over his lips. Thinks about Jaemin’s elated grin just before he slammed the door in his face. The soft curve of his cheek—twice in one week. The weight of his hand steadying his waist. His strong, warm back, the biting wind, the phantom pain of longing. Only then does he think about what the hell he’s just done.

 

*

 

Jeno manages to bottle it up inside for almost half a day before he caves in and calls in a nationwide emergency.

“I’m really going to charge your ass for my emotional labor,” is the first thing that Donghyuck says as he busts through the door and haphazardly kicks off his shoes. One of them hits Jeno in his good shin. “Don’t think I won’t do it, either,” he threatens with a menacing glower and his phone in his hand.

“I’m really sorry, but this is important,” Jeno insists, picking up Donghyuck’s sneakers and rearranging them neatly on the doormat. “My life is on the line.”

“You know what else is important and on the line? My beauty sleep,” Donghyuck argues. Jeno follows him wordlessly as he trudges up the stairs and dives into Jeno’s bed without asking for permission. “Was I the only person you called? Why do you hate me?”

Jeno carefully wriggles in next to him and lets Donghyuck latch onto his side like an octopus. “I called Injun, too.”

“Right, I forgot that we were your only friends since Mark died and you won’t talk to Jaemin.”

Jeno ignores this. “He picked up but he probably went right back to sleep. You know how it is when you wake him up this early,” he says in a way that may or may not have been suggestive. He then adds, “What do we have to do to pry Mark-hyung away from his cool college friends?”

The innuendo flies over Donghyuck’s head and he snorts. “I don’t care, he’s dead to me. Anyway, the sky could fall right on Injun’s face and he wouldn’t even notice. Not before 10am. What did he sound like?”

“Groggy and angry,” answers Jeno. “You sure you don’t know where he is?”

“How would I know?” he asks sleepily, sincerely frowning in confusion at Jeno. This in turn makes Jeno frown, but he doesn’t push it. “I know you and everyone else think I’m a genius and while that is true, I’m not Nostradamus.”

“No one thinks you’re a genius,” corrects Jeno teasingly.

Donghyuck huffs, nuzzles deeper into Jeno’s neck, and starts snoring approximately three seconds later.

The sound of the front door opening and closing and the muffled pitter-patter of footsteps up the staircase saves Jeno’s shirt from being soaked with drool. Renjun opens the bedroom door, makes a funny face at Donghyuck cuddling up to Jeno ( _Jealousy_ , he deduces), shrugs, then dive-bombs into Jeno’s other side, overcrowding his full-sized bed.

“Get off, Injun, we’re over maximum occupancy,” Jeno complains.

“Wow, how is it that Jeno Lee gets all the hoes?” mumbles Donghyuck, startled awake by the violently bouncing bed.

“You do realize that you’ve just called yourself a hoe, right?” he points out.

“Yes, and?”

“ _I’m_ not a hoe,” refutes Renjun.

“Of course you’re not,” Jeno says hurriedly. “You’re very faithful.”

“And very pure,” he adds, voice fading.

“A faithful, pure hoe,” concludes Donghyuck drowsily, snuggling into Jeno again. “Pure as in one hundo percent.”

Renjun mumbles something undecipherable in response.

Realizing that both of them would just fall asleep again if they stayed in his bed, Jeno somehow manages to wrangle them downstairs. He had thought this would have been an easy task, although he now realizes that he was a fool to think so. Donghyuck was as stubborn as a mule, much sturdier than he appeared, and had absolutely no reservations about strong-arming Jeno, even though they were unfairly matched in terms of usable legs. Renjun had the annoying tendency to go completely boneless as a defense mechanism, which was very effective despite looking like he only weighed twenty pounds soaking wet. Both of them were merciless as per usual.

Jeno collapses onto the couch and wipes away actual beads of sweat. “I hate you guys,” he whines. “I’m a teenager, not an animal wrangler.”

“Are you saying teenagers can’t be animal wranglers? This just in: Jeno Lee is problematic as hell,” Donghyuck announces, too tired to come up with something wittier or with less shock value.

“I hate you,” Jeno says again. “How can you stand him, Injun?”

“He’s your friend too,” points out Renjun plaintively. “You know who I really miss? Mark-hyung.”

“Dude, get in line,” Jeno says fiercely.

“Mark Lee,” Donghyuck chants at the ceiling and pounds his chest as if he could actually hear him all the way from college, keeping his Mark-is-dead running joke alive. “You’re always in our hearts, man.”

Jeno eyes him and carefully says, “But that’s not _everyone_ who’s in your heart, right?”

“Why are you being like this? Who hurt you? No, let me guess—Jaemin?” Donghyuck asks, raising an eyebrow at him. He is quickly distracted, though, by a half-eaten bag of chips on his side of the loveseat he shared with Renjun. “Oh, dude, no way, how did you get ketchup chips?” He turns his face up to the ceiling again. “Ketchup chips: in loving memory of Mark Lee.”

“You can have some as long as you listen to my problems,” Jeno promises, because he is a nice person, and also because he understands that sometimes his friends need an incentive.

“Yo. Keep the problems coming, I’m all ears,” Donghyuck agrees, sticking a hand in the bag. “Tell Hyuckie and Injunie what’s wrong, child. But slowly though.”

“Or as fast as you want,” Renjun says, shrugging. Donghyuck pouts at him around a mouthful of chips.

Jeno takes in a deep breath.

“I, um.” He squints up at the ceiling, praying for the spirit of Mark (who was very much still alive, so his spirit probably wouldn’t be able to hear him) to help guide him in this trying time. “Uh, I think I have, like. Um, like a—you know.”

“Wow, here we go again,” Donghyuck says dryly.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Jeno demands. “I just—I like—uh, I mean, I kind of feel like… you know, it’s probably nothing, but, um, I—”

“Oh my god, Jeno, _please_ , I can’t take it anymore,” Renjun bursts out desperately. “We get it, you have a huge crush on Nana and you don’t know what to do because you’re going through soul-crushing inner turmoil.” He checks his phone. “At _eight-thirty in the morning_.”

“No, I do not, and no, I am not,” Jeno lies through his teeth, fully aware that he is a horrible liar. “But also, isn’t it like what you always say? ‘Emotions wait for no man’?”

Renjun and Donghyuck share an exasperated look that doesn’t go unnoticed.

“Hey!” Jeno protests.

“What?” says Donghyuck, somewhat crankily.

“Stop looking at each other!”

“Why would you ask us to stop looking at each other?” Renjun asks in genuine confusion.

“Ugh. Never mind,” Jeno sulks, vowing to squeeze their secret relationship out of them sooner or later. “Something happened. On Friday. When you two ditched me.”

“Oh, thank god,” Donghyuck says.

Something inside of him picks that moment to detonate. “Guys, no,” he wails miserably. “I _kissed_ him. On the cheek. _Again_.”

“Oh, thank _god_ ,” Donghyuck repeats. “Oh my god, yes. Jeno, you’ve done it! Oh my god! What a relief! This could not have gone better,” he says to Renjun for some reason. But suddenly Donghyuck freezes, his smile sliding off his face and replaced with a worried frown. “Wait, oh no, Jeno, why are you sad about this?”

Jeno is sure that he truly looks pitiful because Donghyuck parts with the ketchup chips and gently slides them across the coffee table so that they’re in front of him, like a peace offering. He vaguely remembers someone once telling him about the German term for emotional overeating. _Kummerspeck_. Grief bacon. He wasn’t at that point yet, but there was nothing wrong with a little stress carbo-loading.

“What have I done?” Jeno bemoans with a mouthful of chips. “I went ahead and jeopardized our friendship because my brain’s a jumbled mess. Where did this crush even come from? Is it even a crush? Do I really like him? Like, _like_ -like him?”

“That was three ‘like's in a row,” notes Donghyuck, bewildered.

A truly spine-chilling thought hits him. “What if I bumped my head when I fell and that’s why I suddenly like him?”

“Jeno, I’ve beaten you up thousands of times before and not once have you spontaneously developed a crush on me,” Renjun says in disbelief. “This was clearly a preexisting condition. Besides,” he adds in a much kinder voice, “since when did people ever need a logical reason to like each other?”

“I guess you’re right,” Jeno says slowly. “You and Hyuck like each other, which is still insane to me.”

Renjun considers Donghyuck and says, “Well, it’s far too late to start making new friends now.”

Donghyuck shoves him, which distracts them both from Jeno’s skeptical look. “I’m a gem and you nerds know it. Did Nana say anything? Did he look mad? Is that why you’re worried?” He pauses. “Wait, why would Nana ever be mad about kisses? He lives for that kind of thing.”

Jeno shrugs. “I told him what you said at lunch on Friday, so even if he did look angry, he’d come for your ass first.”

“You said it was my fault?” Donghyuck restates incredulously. “I was just trying to comfort you in a dark time and you put the blame on me because you’re too chicken to own up to your feelings? Unbelievable.”

Jeno had been friends with Donghyuck long enough to know that he had meant the words in a teasing way, but it still didn’t stop them from stinging out of truth.

“Whatever. Jaemin probably doesn’t even like me that way. He probably thought it was just a joke,” Jeno mopes.

“Why? Did he punch you or something?” asks Renjun pointedly.

“No, he smiled,” he admits grudgingly, remembering the pretty shape of Jaemin’s surprised but happy grin. “But you know how Nana is. He always smiles when he’s confused.”

“Which is almost all of the time,” adds Donghyuck. “I get it now. You two are perfect for each other.”

“But it doesn’t sound like he completely hated it. Maybe you should talk to him,” Renjun suggests wryly, always an inconvenient shining beacon of reason in the midst of their usual doom and gloom. “You know, like how normal human beings do.”

“ _Or_ ,” Jeno counters, “how about I never see or talk to him again and run away and join the circus?”

“You wouldn’t last one day in the circus,” Donghyuck dismisses.

“Why? Because I’m not as funny-looking as you?”

Donghyuck pauses, then curses. “At least I’m _fun_.”

Just as Jeno is about to reply, Renjun cuts in impatiently, “There’s no more time for banter! Jeno, you _have_ to talk to Jaemin. You’re so tortured about it.” He glances at Donghyuck, who nods sincerely back. “I know you think that we were brought into existence just to rob you of your will to live, but we really don’t like to see you all mopey, Mopey.”

“God, being the oldest really drains all the fun out of you,” Donghyuck ribs. “Is that why Mark-hyung was so mature and responsible? No thanks. You’ll be worse than Jeno if you keep this up, Injun.”

“It’s okay, Injun,” Jeno consoles. “We’re always looking for more members of the no fun club.”

“As if I would ever stoop down to your level, Jeno Lee,” Renjun retorts, slightly scandalized. He snaps out of it shortly after. “But you have to promise us that you’ll meet with Jaemin soon. Soon as in before Monday. Otherwise you’ll just be weird at lunch and then corner us in the hallway and unleash all your problems on us and then beat us up with your crutches or something.”

“Call him _right now!_ ” Donghyuck suggests excitedly.

“Do not do that,” Renjun says immediately with mild alarm. “This is not a 9am conversation.”

“Well, duh, I’m not a dummy,” Jeno replies, discretely tucking his phone back into his pocket. “But I swear. Soon.”

Renjun eyes him.

“Sunday night,” Jeno promises. “You can come over and beat me up if I haven’t by midnight.”

“I will hold you to that,” Renjun says menacingly, but softens his stance. “Look, you don’t even need to make a big deal out of it or even confess if you’re still confused. But at least talk to him.”

Like a veil had been lifted from his heart, Jeno takes in the funny little sight in front of him then—Donghyuck functioning solely off the thrilling prospect of finding him love and also possibly only five hours of sleep, and Renjun glaring at him, although Jeno suspects he was really trying not to pass out—and finds his heart close to bursting.

He holds out his arms. “Cuddle puddle now,” he demands.

Donghyuck zooms over to his side immediately, hugging him with the ferociousness of an angry lion, but not before snatching back the bag of ketchup chips. Renjun slinks over and wraps his arms around them both, careful not to jostle Jeno’s fracture.

“Thanks guys,” Jeno says quietly. “You’re the best.”

“Great, we know, that’s settled, love you too or whatever,” Donghyuck mumbles. He presses a cheek to Jeno’s cheek and Jeno doesn’t even wrinkle his nose or fuss too much. “Now let’s all finish these ketchup chips and then go the hell back to sleep, you huge walking disaster. Trust me, it’s what Mark-hyung would’ve wanted.”

“Rest in peace, Mark Lee,” Renjun agrees and dives for the chips.

 

*

 

Nana  
`hey are you awake?`

Nana  
`dumb question I know you are`

Nana  
`come outside! but bring a jacket it’s cold`

Nana  
`fyi the blue one brings out your eyes ♡`

 

Years ago, before Jeno had ever met any of his friends, he would have never even dreamed that he would grow up to be the kind of kid who snuck out in the dead of night. He’d always heard stories of teenaged miscreants who would cause trouble in seedy alleyways and illegally loiter around in the streets. Now here he was, eighteen and carefully tiptoeing—well, really, the best tiptoe he could manage on only one foot and two crutches—across the silent house and avoiding the spots where the floorboards were the creakiest.

Jeno opens the door and crosses an invisible, indescribable threshold into the surreal night air.

It was cold, like Jaemin had warned. Bitingly so. He almost regrets not pretending that he was, in fact, asleep. But then Jeno sees Jaemin waiting on his violently red excuse for a bike with a blanket tucked in the front basket, face softly illuminated by the porch light, looking up at him with all the warmth in the world, and at that moment Jeno felt like he could solve all of the universe’s most puzzling unsolved mysteries.

“You’re not wearing the blue jacket,” Jaemin whispers, smiling.

“There’s no way it brings out my eyes, you horrible flirt,” Jeno says. “My eyes are brown.”

“That’s what I like about your eyes! The color!”

“Your eyes are the same color as mine, dummy,” he points out. “Besides, you’ve never said anything nice about my eyes before.”

“Now you’re just fishing for compliments,” Jaemin teases. “Everyone’s who’s ever seen you knows you have the cutest eye-smile in the world.”

Jeno tamps down that fluttering, aching feeling in his chest that made him go completely useless. “That’s my _smile_ ,” he says wryly. “Say something nice about my eyeballs.”

“Wow, they help you see,” intones Jaemin. “Amazing.”

“You really are the worst.” Jeno grins and gestures to the bike with a crutch. “What were you up to?”

“Well, I was thinking I’d Prince Charming you again, take two. Without the double hunchback this time. Only in the middle of the night, like a real delinquent.” Jaemin considers this. “So I guess I’m actually not Prince Charming after all but just some random thug.”

“I don’t know about all of this,” Jeno teases, carefully hopping down the porch stairs with Jaemin’s hand on his waist steadying him. “Maybe I kind of liked the double hunchback.”

Jaemin laughs. “Whatever floats your boat, Jeno, I won’t judge.”

Like the day before, Jeno hands his crutches over to Jaemin, settles onto the rear rack, and shyly, hesitantly snakes his arms around Jaemin’s waist. His fingers curl into the soft wool of Jaemin’s sweater and he hooks his chin over his shoulder.

“Aren’t you going to ask where we’re going?” Jaemin asks after he starts pedaling down the block.

He hums. "No. I trust you, Nana.”

“What if I was planning to murder you?”

“I feel like you couldn’t ask that if you were actually gonna murder me. That’s like Murderer 101. Also, you aren’t Injun,” he adds, “so I’m not scared.”

“I’m gonna tell him you said that,” Jaemin sing-songs.

He hugs him tighter. “Oh, god, please don’t. He’s already kind of mad at me, I think.”

“Why? Did you grill him about him and Donghyuck?”

“I don’t know, kind of. I think I annoyed him earlier this morning,” Jeno says, which was technically not a lie. “But I’ll do anything. Please spare me.”

Jaemin laughs, and Jeno really wishes he could see his face when he asks liltingly, “Really? You’ll do _anything?_ ”

Jeno squeezes his eyes shut and lets himself dissolve into the moment. Mostly he tries not to accidentally spiral into an existential crisis. The other bits of him, the conscious parts, though, soak it all in—the wind nipping at his nape, the bike’s rattling wheels, almost as if it wasn’t quite designed to hold the weight of two teenaged boys, the swishing sound of his windbreaker every time he so much as breathed too deeply. The stars peeking through the night sky, casting an eerie silver glow on their skin. Jaemin’s warmth, again, imbuing the very air.

He’s saying something else now as he turns down a familiar parkway but Jeno really isn’t paying too much attention. Instead, he’s somewhere in between the fire in his heart and the magnetic attraction in their orbits. The enormousness of their gravity.

“Where’d you go?” Jaemin asks, snapping Jeno out of his thoughts. Jeno blinks and looks around, realizing that they were at the river, their usual spot before the accident. “You were a million miles away.”

“Just thinking. You kidnapped me and brought me to the very same place where I broke my leg?” Jeno asks, amused. “This is a hate crime. What if I break my other leg tonight?”

“I guess I’d just have to carry you everywhere.”

“Hmm,” Jeno pretends to consider. “That sure would be very convenient for me.”

“Same! I’d gain so much muscle. Hey, let me shove you into the river real quick.”

Jeno makes the disgruntled face that he knows Jaemin likes on him so much. Sure enough, Jaemin laughs when he sees his wrinkled nose and scrunched up eyebrows, and he lightly shoves Jeno’s elbow.

He keeps his hand there even once they’ve lied down on the plush blanket, curled up together in each other’s atmospheres like binary stars. Jaemin rests his head on top of Jeno’s chest, half-wrapped up and shivering under Jeno’s windbreaker, too, but being careful to avoid his walking boot.

“You should’ve brought a jacket,” Jeno scolds. “You were the one who warned me it’d be cold, remember?”

“I thought I was stronger,” Jaemin bemoans, though he looks up at Jeno with a grin. “Next time I’ll fight the wind.” Another bone-chilling breeze rolls in and Jeno pulls him in fiercely, lifting the corner of the blanket they weren’t lying on and draping it over them both. “Ugh, why, it’s almost summer.”

“You and me, 5pm sharp tomorrow in the parking lot,” Jeno pretends to challenge the wind, pointing at the sky. “Prepare to square up or get beat up.”

Jaemin laughs into his collarbone, the warm air of his breath condensing on his skin, and it’s not the cold that comes instantly after that makes him shudder. “I don’t why you’re afraid of Injun when you’re so scary and tough yourself,” he says.

“Dude, you don’t know Injun like I know Injun.”

He shrugs, shoulders knocking into Jeno’s. “Personally, I think Donghyuck is scarier.”

Jeno gapes down at him. “Donghyuck? Lee Donghyuck? No way.” He stops to think. “Well, he did almost beat Mark-hyung’s ass into a pulp last summer… Okay, yeah, never mind, I guess Hyuck _is_ pretty scary.” He frowns. “Man, how did we end up with the two scariest people on the planet as our best friends?”

“And now they’re together? Or maybe they aren’t? I still can’t tell. It’s been torturing me all weekend.”

“Who knows?” Jeno says, huffing. “Maybe they’ll stop owning us and leave us alone now.”

What Jeno doesn’t consider until that moment, though, is that he and Jaemin were together alone often—right there, obviously, for instance, but Jaemin has been his best friend for years and years. There was almost no memory he had past the age of ten that Jaemin hadn’t saturated in some way, no moment in time that Jeno could remember _not_ thinking of him.

Even when Jaemin was in and out of physical therapy last year, Jeno would come round his house—with or without Donghyuck, Renjun, or Mark—and update him on the latest gossip and every diss Jisung had said that week at track. More often than not there was nothing to actually talk about since they had their group chat, but there was always the insatiable part of Jeno that just wanted to be there with him. Every moment away from Jaemin felt like the phase in his planetary revolution furthest away from the sun.

“I was actually going to call you today,” Jeno admits, thinking to his conversation earlier with Donghyuck and Renjun. They had only left him after they’d eaten all of his snacks and bullied him to their hearts’ content and snored loud enough to deafen him for hours. Typical, really. “Um, and then I thought I’d better call you tomorrow. But I’m glad you made me come out tonight!” he adds hastily. “Even though you totally abducted me.”

“You left your house and got on that bike on your own volition,” Jaemin says dryly. “You basically abducted yourself.” He shifts even closer to Jeno. “What were you gonna talk to me about?”

In a single second, Jeno’s mouth goes as dry as the siroccos.

“Uh,” he says intelligently.

“ _Uh_ ,” Jaemin teases, grinning at him.

“Ketchup chips,” he blurts out. “They’re so good. Seriously delicious.”

Jaemin shorts and flicks his forehead. “You’re so weird, Jeno. But I guess I’m flattered that you thought of me.”

He untangles himself from Jeno’s embrace and sits up, a hand taking Jeno’s hand and intertwining them.

“I actually had something to say to you, too,” Jaemin says softly, running a thumb over Jeno’s and looking directly into his eyes, and Jeno can feel his heart start to pound. “It’s not about ketchup chips, though. But I really just wanted to apologize for last week—I never got to say sorry. You got hurt because of me.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Jeno refutes sincerely. He squeezes Jaemin’s thumb playfully. “I’d fight the wind for you, remember?”

Jaemin shakes his head. “But it’s not just that,” he insists quietly. “Like I said before, I miss you. I really do. I feel like…” He trails off, taking Jeno’s hand in his own again. “I kind of feel like things have been off between us. With my year of PT and your accident, and then I had that group project.” He frowns. “I really felt rotten that I wasn’t there for you.”

“It’s okay, Nana, I understand. Donghyuck and Injun helped.”

“But you _don’t_ understand, Jeno,” Jaemin protests, furrowing his eyebrows together in frustration. “I know this sounds really dumb and petty but I’m your best friend. You’ve always been there for me, but I wasn’t for you and I should’ve been. I let you down.”

There is really nothing Jeno can do except pull Jaemin back into his embrace, their limbs automatically tangling together—the clunky boot and all—as if it were embedded in both of their DNAs. All the tension bleeds out of Jaemin’s frame as he tucks his head beneath Jeno’s chin, and Jeno’s fingers start to run through his soft hair of their own volition.

“There’s nothing you could do to ever let me down, Nana. You’ll always be my best friend,” he promises fiercely, even though it makes his heart ache. “Although, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll let you do all my grunt work for me. Feel free to carry all of my books for the next few weeks.”

Jaemin nods, grinning. “I’ll be your walking meat shield any day of the week.”

Jeno wrinkles his nose. “Thanks, Nana, but veto on ‘meat shield.’”

He ignores Jeno and continues, “But I can only do it during the day though. Track, remember? And you know how Coach Minho is—he’ll really kill me if I skip for the next few weeks to bike you home. Hyuck and Injun won’t mind if I take over for them, right?”

“I don’t think they would be stupid enough to stop you, but if they do, you guys can just Battle Royale it out.”

“Who do you think would win in a fight between the three of us?”

“Great question. They’re definitely both scrappy but you’re the tallest out of all of us, so I feel like that has to count for something.” He traces circles on the crown of Jaemin’s head, as if he could color in a real crown. “Congratulations, you win.”

“What’s the prize again?”

“You get to be my slave.”

Jaemin grins into his clavicle. “You just want me for my body.”

Jeno chokes, but manages to recover in less than a day. A new record. “Yeah, for the manual labor. You’re gross. Best friend status revoked.”

“Aww, Jeno, you love me,” he coos.

His heart squeezes bittersweetly.

“I really do, Nana,” he says.

“Are you going to kiss me again?” Jaemin teases.

Jeno slowly props himself up on his elbows and stares into Jaemin’s twinkling eyes, bursting full with stars, mirroring the deep night sky. _What if?_ asks his heart, but the voice is too small, too far away, buried too deep inside his chest, and it gets drowned out by the rushing water of the river.

So Jeno smiles because he can’t find the words and chastely kisses Jaemin’s forehead instead.

“Super manly,” he says, echoing Donghyuck again, and Jaemin laughs sweetly. _It’s better off this way_ , he thinks, but finds that he isn’t so sure if it’s true, if he believes it for even a second.

 

*

 

For the next few weeks, Jaemin makes good on his promise and takes over what Jeno refers to in his head as hallway babysitting duty, much to Donghyuck and Renjun’s unfettered delight.

“Free at last!” Donghyuck had exclaimed, clambering to hand him Jeno’s backpack as if Jaemin would rescind his offer if he didn’t get it fast enough. “Thank you, Nana, you’ve really saved our lives.”

“If I had to carry two backpacks for another week, my spine would permanently compress,” Renjun had complained.

“And then Injun would never grow tall enough to beat up Jisung,” Donghyuck had lamented.

“I’m tall enough to beat you up, Lee Donghyuck,” Renjun had threatened him, and that was the last of them Jeno and Jaemin had seen that day before Renjun chased Donghyuck, both of them shrieking and almost getting written up for being too disruptive in a learning environment.

“Verdict?” Jeno had asked Jaemin, who had sported the double hunchback with great dignity.

Jaemin had squinted at their hastily retreating figures until they blended into the crowded hall. “I really can’t tell with those two.” He had turned to Jeno and shrugged. “Shall we?”

It was different with Jaemin than it was with either Donghyuck or Renjun, in that it was oddly both more comfortable and more _un_ comfortable at the same time, although Jaemin never showed any indication that he didn’t want to be there. The opposite, really—Jaemin was always there to help with a bright smile and a hand and his blindingly red bike, no questions asked. Jeno almost wishes he wouldn’t, but can’t exactly place why.

The days pass in that off, delicately stagnant state between them. Little things change: in an unexpected turn of events, Donghyuck was now acing stats (“I’m tutoring him,” Renjun had told them, which did not clarify Jeno and Jaemin’s confusion on what exactly was going on between them. “What do you think ‘tutoring’ means?” Jeno had asked Jaemin when they were alone, but realized as soon as he said it that under no circumstance he did want an answer), Renjun grew three-quarters of a centimeter (“One step closer to annihilating Park Jisung,” he had said, although none of them could parse whether he was joking or not), Jaemin obtained a personal best in the 800m event at his latest track meet, and Jeno, doing his best not to go insane waiting for his fracture to heal, had taken up the thrilling hobby of knitting.

“Why are you doing this to me,” Donghyuck had said at lunch as if Jeno’s grandma pastimes were a personal affront. “First your three cats, now this.”

“Take that back about my cats,” Jeno had said, appalled.

“You’re right, I’m sorry, I love your cats.”

“My leg won’t get better until after track season is over. You try sitting around at home doing nothing all day because it’s too much of a hassle to move. It’s impossible not to get antsy,” Jeno had defended, pulling out his half-finished scarf from his backpack. “Besides, I just learned how to purl stitch.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“You’ve always been really good with your hands, Jeno,” Renjun had said, admiring his work. “But you know that it’s almost summer soon, right?”

“It still gets chilly at night sometimes,” Jaemin had said, smiling at Jeno. “Hey, you should make me a scarf! That way I’ll always have a piece of you to warm me up.”

All three of them had actively ignored Donghyuck’s fake retching sounds, although Renjun looked dangerously close to joining in.

At his Monday checkup, Jeno’s physician finally takes pity on him, his sore arms, and inconvenient crutches, and lets him upgrade to a weight-bearing walking boot.

“It looks like your fracture is healing really well. You won’t need to use your crutches anymore, but strenuous activity is strictly off-limits,” she informs him kindly but firmly. “Going to all of your physical therapy appointments is really important, too.”

Jeno really didn’t mind the PT, but it always made him think of how miserable Jaemin had been last year, the way he had been constantly achy and cranky despite his best efforts to stay positive. Then again, Jaemin also did not have Jeno’s therapist Minseok, who was Mark’s family friend, very sweet, and also quite possibly the strongest short person Jeno had ever met in his life.

The new weight-bearing boot is somehow even clunkier and more uncomfortable than his old boot, tight enough to rub a blister on his ankle in only a few hours, but his newfound freedom made him feel drunk with power.

 

Me  
`I have two legs now!!! Don’t walk me to and from and during school losers, I don’t need you anymore`

Nana  
`aww yay so happy for you jen! don’t strain yourself pls ♡`

Me  
`Dw my therapist said exercise was good for me`

Fullsun  
`wtf I hope you trip you asshole`

Injoong  
`how did you grow a leg overnight?????`

Fullsun  
`like not even just once or twice I hope you trip 20 times both ways and NINETY times in the hall`

Fullsun  
`pavement-eating hoe smh`

 

On Tuesday, Jeno makes his triumphant comeback. He staggers in proudly with what he referred to as his 1980’s moon boot, moving at speeds only slightly slower than the average garden snail.

As was to be expected, Jaemin, Donghyuck, and Renjun all rib him mercilessly (“Why did you stick your foot in a mini-fridge?” Donghyuck had exclaimed when he saw the new boot, which didn’t even make sense), although Jeno couldn’t help notice with fondness and gratitude that they had been eyeing him like hawks all day, all on high alert for the slightest sign of discomfort.

“Please stop mom-ing me, everyone. I didn’t sign up to have three helicopter parents,” Jeno complains at lunch.

“We just don’t want you to hurt yourself again,” Jaemin says warmly. “You’re our friend.”

“Speak for yourself,” says Donghyuck, even though he was the one who had looked the most worried out of all of them. “There isn’t enough money in the world to bribe me to be Lee Jeno’s friend.”

“Good,” says Jeno. “I can’t pay you.”

“Fine,” says Donghyuck.

“Fine,” agrees Jeno.

“ _Fine_ —”

“The thing about parents is that you can’t really choose what kind you have,” Renjun interrupts. “And also, who’re you calling moms?” he adds crossly.

Jeno wisely chooses not to answer.

Despite their excessive worrying, his first taste of freedom goes without a significant hitch. It was true that Jeno had one more killer blister on his ankle bone than he started the day with, and that his ego was a bit bruised from being constantly passed in the hallway by students and teachers who didn’t have moon boots on, and that Donghyuck called his boot by a different home appliance every time they passed each other on the way to class, each more bewildering than the last. He had ended the day on electric kettle, and at this point of his life, Jeno had learned that it is always much easier not to question Donghyuck and just take his word for it.

But it was also nice, in a way, to not constantly feel like a burden to his friends, even if Jeno knew that they would drop everything if he so much as asked. What a relief it was to not have to drag them down with the speed—or lack thereof—of him hopping around with crutches, to set his own pace. He had hated feeling like he kept Donghyuck and Renjun away from getting home on time.

Now, rather defiantly, Jeno takes his sweet ass time packing up after school like he used to, long after Donghyuck and Renjun had said their goodbyes and also asked him upwards of fifty times if he needed help or a ride. He had missed taking the familiar stroll home by himself and getting lost in his thoughts. The boot slowed him down and his new blister was making him limp a little funny, but it was easy enough to let go of his head and start daydreaming before he even left the building.

Which is precisely why Jeno is so badly startled when Jaemin calls out to him, “Wow, it took you long enough. I really thought I was gonna have to wait forever.”

Jeno does his best to pretend that he hadn’t almost dropped his phone in fright and turns around to see Jaemin leaning casually against the wall next to the entrance, hands in his pockets, head tilted up so that his face caught the light of the afternoon sun.

“What drama are you auditioning for?” Jeno asks incredulously.

“ _School 2018_ ,” Jaemin says, gesturing around them. “Duh.”

“Forget I asked,” he says wryly. “What are you doing here, Nana? It’s Tuesday.”

“Why? I can’t be here on Tuesdays?”

“Exactly,” says Jeno with a straight face. “But also you have track.”

Jaemin shrugs. “Track, shmack. Jisung’s holding down the fort.” He pauses. “Probably.” Jaemin looks like he was about to say something else about Jisung’s work ethic but thinks better than to go down that rabbit hole. “Jisung will probably make captain someday… in two years. Anyway, this is my second-to-last absence left for my last year of track ever, so I have to make the most of it.”

“What if you actually get sick?” Jeno points at his moon boot. “Or break a leg?”

“Do you really think the main character of a teen drama would have a contingency plan?”

“First of all, you’re not in a teen drama.” As soon the words leave Jeno’s mouth, all the arguments against this suddenly well up in his head in voices that sound suspiciously like Donghyuck and Renjun simultaneously nagging at him. “Second of all, teen drama characters aren’t actually real.”

Jaemin laces his fingers with Jeno’s and says very seriously, “I know it seems like I’m your dream come true but trust me, I’m real.”

If this were truly a teen drama, Jeno thinks, chagrinned, then this would be the part where he would say something incredibly witty and flirty back. Instead, he is too busy praying that Jaemin either can’t feel or doesn’t care that Jeno’s palms have very abruptly become wetter than a monsoon.

“I’ve never dreamed about you,” Jeno lies.

“Really?” Jaemin peers into his eyes, genuinely curious. “Not even once?”

“Maybe in a nightmare or something.” Jeno has no idea where this is coming from. He thought about Jaemin all the time, whether awake or asleep. “So you’re just skipping practice for no reason?”

He laughs. “No, dummy, I thought we should celebrate you getting better.”

Jaemin squeezes his sweaty hand and Jeno lets himself be led back to his familiar searingly red bike, glistening and glaring as it reflected a sunbeam directly into their eyes.

“I know you missed this bad girl,” Jaemin says, grinning.

“Your bike is a girl?”

“I see how it is. You don’t know anything about me or my life,” Jaemin declares dramatically. He regretfully lets go of Jeno’s hand and sits down on the seat, swiveling his backpack around to his front to make room for Jeno. Jeno thinks he looks a bit like a kangaroo. “Want me to take your backpack too?”

“I got it from here, Prince Charming,” Jeno says, settling down on the rear rack. Wrapping his arms around Jaemin’s waist felt like coming home.

Like the night at the river, Jeno doesn’t have a clue where Jaemin is taking them, and a part of him is sure that Jaemin himself doesn’t even know where they’re headed. It was so like Jaemin to go with the flow while Jeno was always the semi-responsible one. It was why their friendship worked so well.

“You feel like ice cream?” Jaemin asks after a while.

“Yes,” Jeno agrees immediately, but remembers something crucial. “Wait, damn it, no, I didn’t bring my wallet to school today.”

“Hey, it’ll be my treat.” Jaemin pats his front pocket with one hand. He frowns. Switches hands to pat his other pocket. The frown only deepens. He stops the bike, turns around to look at Jeno and admits sheepishly, “Uh, just kidding, I didn’t bring my wallet either. Sorry.”

Jeno laughs at Jaemin’s crestfallen face. “It’s okay, Nana. Besides, it’s pretty cold today.”

He scoffs. “If you think a cold draft ever stopped me from getting ice cream then you’re dead wrong, Jeno. I’ll never be stopped or thwarted!”

“Except by lack of funds,” Jeno points out.

“Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to be a criminal on the run?”

“You mean have I ever wanted to be known forever as a high school ice cream robber? No thanks.” He pats his moon boot. “Also, I technically can’t be on the run.”

Jaemin rings his bike bell. “We have the bike! I’ll pedal twice as fast.”

Jeno snorts. “Nana, your bike from middle school has got to be the least sexiest getaway vehicle I’ve ever seen.”

Jaemin pouts at him. “You’re right, there’s no sex appeal in this old lady at all.” He totally misses Jeno’s nose scrunch up in repulsion at his phrasing. “What a bummer. Should I just drop you off at home?”

Logically, Jeno knew that would be for the best. The amount of homework he had kept multiplying exponentially time of year, directly correlating with his growing apathy about schoolwork. If they went home now then Jaemin would only be about half an hour late to track practice, and there was a possibility that Coach Minho _wouldn’t_ skin him alive.

But then there was the selfish part of Jeno—small and quiet, but thrumming louder and louder in his head. It wasn’t the sound of Donghyuck and Renjun’s nagging at all, he suddenly realizes, but his own voice instead, echoing what he had pretended not to know or hear all along.

So Jeno holds Jaemin tighter, at peace with letting this moment just be, and says, “Let’s go to the river.”

 

*

 

Jeno meets Jaemin like this:

When they were eleven. Twelve. Jaemin had foiled highlights that seemed really cool at the time, but now they look back and laugh at how tacky it was. Jeno had only just gotten as tall as the bookshelf in the living room that used to tower over him.

It was the first day of school. Maybe it was raining. Maybe it was in math. No, it was after math. If he really tries hard to pull up the memory of that day, he can hear Donghyuck cackling at something that happened over summer vacation. In corner somewhere. A desk. The comforting smell of old wood. Cold metal table legs. Writing his locker combination onto his arm with Donghyuck’s purple pen.

Renjun to his left, his pencil tucked behind his ear. It was a new thing he was trying out but it didn’t stick around for very long. Donghyuck’s TI-83, on which they typed out dirty messages because they were eleven, twelve. Maybe it was during math after all. Jeno’s brand new tennis shoes squeaking across the polished floor.

Getting lost. Oh, right, sitting in the wrong classroom for ten full minutes. Renjun laughing mercilessly. Penciling his name on a sign-in sheet next to Mark’s, hiding behind his shoulder. _TRACK & FIELD_ in bold letters.

And then there’s Jaemin’s voice for the first time, bright, floating somewhere in Jeno’s head, unanchored but weighted down at the same time. “Hey,” Jeno thinks Jaemin had said, “haven’t I seen you around before? At the river near the high school?”

He must’ve turned around, then. Must’ve reluctantly peeled himself away from Mark’s encouraging side. Must’ve seen his athletic shorts, beat up running shoes, the brightest red bike he’d ever seen. His highlights, his perfect toothy smile. The rain letting up outside. Must’ve thought, _No way, the same river?_ Must’ve said, “Hi, I’m Jeno.” Must’ve somehow known, _This person is going to be my best friend_.

Jeno doesn’t remember the rest. He never needed to. Jaemin has been with him ever since, through thick and thin—when Renjun was in China for a whole summer and Jeno absolutely did _not_ cry, when Donghyuck and Mark refused to speak to each other another summer and Donghyuck _did_ cry, when Jaemin went through PT and put on his bravest face the entire time. On this ordinary Tuesday afternoon when Jaemin was supposed to be at practice and Jeno was supposed to mope at home.

Being the middle of the weekday, their usual spot on the riverbank is even emptier than usual. They sit on top of their jackets in lieu of a blanket, curled up against each other, quietly watching the water flow by. There’s something in the air that Jeno can’t put a finger on—neither heavy nor heady, but as if he were standing on the edge of something, about to tip over in free fall.

Jaemin shifts next to him, resting his cheek in his palm with his elbow propped up, catching Jeno’s attention.

“Don’t things feel different lately?” he says, staring at the current drifting by.

“Sure. Maybe. This is exactly like the depressing, sentimental shit Injun says all the time,” Jeno adds teasingly.

“I’m tattling on you to him,” Jaemin threatens playfully. “It’s not a crime to be sentimental.”

“It is too a crime. You’ll be arrested by the no fun police and I’ll have to come post your bail.”

“I am _very_ fun,” he says, scandalized. “You take that back, Jeno Lee.”

“I stand by what I said. You’re the one skipping practice to stare sadly at some water.”

“You’re the one who suggested coming here. I feel like you’re just as sentimental as me.”

He shrugs. “It’s a good place to think.”

“You think?”

“I do it sometimes,” Jeno insists. “I have straight A’s.”

Jaemin pushes his forehead. “That’s a totally different kind of thinking. Do you actually have thoughts inside that head of yours or is it totally empty?”

“Um, excuse me, I have lots of thoughts.”

“Like?”

“Like…”

 _Like I like you_ , Jeno thinks. _Like I could fall for you. Like you weigh me down and lift me back up all at once. How do you do it?_

For a moment, Jeno worries that Jaemin can read his mind because suddenly he looks him right in the eyes with an unbearable intensity, and Jeno knows it contradicts everything he had just said but all his thoughts evaporate and his mind goes blank. It’s as if that single look pulled him out of his head and into Jaemin’s orbit, hyperaware of the space between their bodies.

In the distance, he can hear the river roaring only a few feet away, the wind whistling through the grass, his jacket crinkling with every breath. But nothing compares to how loud their gravity is.

“Everything is different now,” Jaemin repeats with an unreadable expression. “Don’t you think?”

“I can’t really think right now,” Jeno whispers back, unable to tear his eyes away from Jaemin’s face.

Jaemin gives no indication of whether this was the right answer or not. Instead, he asks delicately, “Didn’t you just say you had lots of thoughts?”

“That was before.”

“Before what?”

It had somehow escaped Jeno’s notice, but one blink was all it took for the haze to dissipate. There Jaemin was, so close to him their hands touched, his warmth radiating off in waves. He was searching Jeno’s face for something, but Jeno didn’t know what—all he knew in that particular moment was Jaemin himself, and then the pieces of him followed. It was the shell of his ear, his windblown hair. The curve of his cheek. The curve of his nose.

His brows. His lashes blinking out the slowly setting sun. The sweatshirt Jeno gave him for his birthday two years ago. The way the ends of his hoodie strings were chewed. A nervous habit. A scuff on his white sneakers. His pinky finger curling over his. The jangle of his bike lock key as he drifted closer.

There was his breath again, that familiar ebb-and-tide, mechanical, as if he had to really think about it.

Jaemin wasn’t smiling but Jeno desperately wanted him to. It was that desperation, those crazy thoughts, the longing of memory that lead him to inch hesitantly towards him, nearer and nearer. It was the curve of Jaemin’s lips. The draw of his gravity.

It was the weight of Jeno’s lips only just brushing against Jaemin’s. Couldn’t have even been considered a kiss, merely a touch, like sweeping a hand through that cottony gauze in a late-summer field of dandelions. But reality crashes back into him and Jeno jolts back, thoroughly electrocuted.

For a heart-stopping second, neither of them are able to say a word. Then—

“I’m so sorry, Nana,” Jeno blurts out, breathless, absolutely mortified. “I’m so, _so_ sorry—”

“No, Jeno, wait,” Jaemin begins to say, but Jeno can’t hear the rest, his heart pounding too loud in his ears, as deafening as a hurricane, compounding with the river and drowning out his voice.

Jeno snatches his jacket and backpack and bolts, and Jaemin doesn’t stop him.

He runs and runs and runs. Every time he thinks he couldn’t possibly run any further, he keeps going. Jeno knew he was pushing his body to the brink but he couldn’t find it in him to stop.

The blister on his ankle bone rubs itself raw against his stupid boot and his fracture, not quite healed yet, aches almost as much as it did when the break was fresh. His lungs are close to bursting because he hadn’t run all season. But no pain in his body could ever compare to the pain in his chest, detonating like a dying star.

Gasping for air, half-drowned in regret and something else, Jeno wonders how in the world could he be so stupid, to think for even a second that Jaemin must’ve wanted him back.

 

*

 

Jeno doesn’t go school the next day or the next, citing that the swelling in his leg was too distracting and wouldn’t be conducive in succeeding in a learning environment. This was technically true—it hurt like hell. His physical therapist Minseok seemed very puzzled as to how he managed to mangle his leg again after only half a day of being on a weight-bearing boot, but Jeno was too embarrassed to tell him the truth and made up some flimsy lie about missing track.

“You can’t push yourself,” Minseok says, frowning at Jeno’s newest emergency x-ray. “Your body will heal at its own pace, and no faster than that.”

“I know,” Jeno mumbles glumly, feeling his phone blow up with texts in his pocket. He was really going to hear it from Donghyuck and Renjun sooner or later.

“The bad news is that it’ll take a few days for the swelling to go down,” continues Minseok. “But the good news is that you didn’t re-fracture your fibula, so you’re good to go.” He hesitates at Jeno’s face, even more miserable than before. “Um… at the risk of breaking doctor/patient confidentiality, should I call Mark? You look like you could use a friendly voice.”

“Nope, I’m good, please don’t call him, thanks for squeezing me in at the last minute!” says Jeno in a rush, thanking Minseok profusely and limping out of his office as quickly as his moon boot and aching leg would allow him.

In those two restless days, Jeno gets five texts from Renjun, all of which had varying degrees of indiscernible tones (although Jeno supposed that, at any given moment, Renjun was always half concerned, half furious), seven from Donghyuck, and—thanks to either Minseok or Donghyuck and Renjun, Jeno wasn’t sure—a very confused text from sweet, beautiful, helpless baby Mark.

 

Morkly  
`Hey man… is everything ok? IDK what is going on (I’m not dead ha ha ha just in college!) but you can always call me, dude. Track buddies for life! :-)`

 

Jaemin texts him at the end of school on Wednesday, but Jeno can’t even bring himself to read it before deleting it from his messages. What surprises him the most, though, is Donghyuck’s ominous voicemail on the end of the second day.

“We need to talk,” was all he said, uncharacteristically serious, before hanging up. Jeno, upon discovering that he was actually supremely spineless when it came to his own feelings, does not call Donghyuck back.

At the end of his self-imposed (and Minseok-imposed) exile, Jeno reluctantly drags his feet back to school, even though he would really rather disappear forever. Somehow he manages to avoid Jaemin, Donghyuck, _and_ Renjun the entire day until lunch, when Jeno takes one hop into the cafeteria and accidentally meets Jaemin’s gaze for less than half a second, before descending into a dark place he swore he’d never come back to.

“You can’t sit with us,” Jisung vehemently protests, immediately shoving his backpack into the empty seat next to him. “Nobody invited you and you’re too old. Also, there’s no room.”

Jeno makes a face at him, removing the backpack and sitting down defiantly. “You’re legally required to be nice to me. I’m injured,” he says, patting his moon boot.

“And whose fault is that?”

“Not mine. Haven’t you missed me at track practice?”

Jisung scowls in response, viciously shoveling a forkful of pasta into his mouth.

“Hi, Jeno-hyung!” Chenle exclaims right into his ear.

“Hey, Chenle,” Jeno greets weakly. “How’s it going?”

“Please go away,” reiterates Jisung. “We don’t need any senior class drama. It’s hard enough being a junior without you dragging us through all your weird, unnecessary problems.”

“You are not a junior,” Jeno points out.

“Chenle is a junior.”

“Still a brat, I see,” he retorts, referring to the missing honorific.

“ _Chenle_ ,” Jisung says with great emphasis, “and I are actually friends. Unlike you and Jaemin-hyung right now. Good going, hyung, it’s actually pretty impressive.” He pats Jeno’s back patronizingly.

Sitting across from him, Chenle beams at Jeno. It’s as though Jeno’s DNA had programmed him to automatically beam back at him, even though he would much rather strangle Jisung.

“I heard from Renjun-hyung about Jaemin-hyung.” Chenle says Jaemin’s name in a whisper, as if Jeno would fall to pieces if he merely heard his name. Jeno hadn’t even known that Chenle was physically capable of whispering. In his normal deafening voice, he continues, “Also, sorry about your leg. That really sucks.”

“I can kind of walk on it now,” Jeno says, shrugging and ignoring the bit about Jaemin, “so it’s okay.” He pauses. “Well, I mean, it still hurts. But it’s fine. Probably.”

“And whose fault is that?” Jisung repeats.

“Mine, I guess,” admits Jeno sulkily.

Jisung points his fork at him. “You know what I find amazing, hyung? It’s that you weren’t even ostracized by your friend group,” he says, “but you actually chose to banish yourself. Sorry, but that’s like the dumbest thing I’ve heard all year, and I heard Jaemin-hyung ask if a meter and a yard were the same thing at practice last week.”

“Oh my god,” Jeno moans. “I came here to eat lunch, not to be tortured by two demons masquerading as underclassmen.”

“If you wanted to eat lunch, then you should’ve just sat alone,” Chenle says. “We’re actually doing you a favor by saving you from feeling sorry for yourself.”

Jisung proudly gives him a high five.

“ _Oh my god_ ,” Jeno says again, faintly. “You two are actually the next Donghyuck and Injun.”

“That’s prejudiced,” Chenle accuses. “You’re just typecasting us and we won’t be pigeonholed!”

“No, my bad, Chenle, you’re right,” agrees Jeno. “No matter how evil you two are, neither of you will ever be as scary as Injun.”

Jisung snorts. “What’s so scary about Renjun-hyung? He’s short and just makes angry faces sometimes. Sure, he tries to smother us every now and then but we’re still alive and kicking. It just proves that he has a weak constitution.”

“Does Injun know you drag him like that?”

He scoffs. “Renjun-hyung can’t hear anything when he’s all the way down there. I’ll only be scared of him when he can reach my shoulders without jumping. Until then,” he says, stabbing another forkful of pasta, “I live with no fears.”

“He’s not that short.”

“What was that?” Jisung pretends to scan the horizon above Jeno’s head. “I can’t hear a word people say when they’re under 175cm.”

“Chenle is under 175cm!” Jeno argues, but he pats Chenle’s head affectionately. To his credit, Chenle only laughs and preens under Jeno’s hand.

Jisung shrugs. “What do you want me to say, hyung? He’s very loud. His voice projects.”

“I’ve never had a teacher ever tell me to speak up in class,” Chenle confirms boastfully.

“I don’t know if I would be proud of that if I were you,” Jeno says doubtfully.

Off of Chenle’s sullen pout, Jisung crosses his arms and counters, “Those are some fighting words, coming from the hyung who was so bad with feelings that he ran a whole mile with a broken leg. At this rate, you’ll be back on the track team by the end of the week.”

“It was not a _mile_ ,” Jeno corrects. “Maybe half a mile at most. And my leg is only a little broken.”

“ _Only a little broken_ , he says,” mocks Jisung.

Suddenly, Chenle’s gaze snaps up at something behind Jeno and he winces. “Oh, boy,” he says.

“‘Oh, boy’ is right,” retorts a familiar voice.

Donghyuck stomps into Jeno’s line of sight then, looking supremely displeased. His expression was frightfully reminiscent of last summer when he spent the entire break pissed off at Mark. Only this time, Jeno realizes with slow-dawning horror, the animosity was directed at _him_.

“Hi, Jisung, Chenle,” Donghyuck sing-songs to the underclassmen. To Jeno, he just narrows his eyes and says, “ _You_.”

“Hey, Hy—”

“I literally do not want to hear it,” Donghyuck interrupts, tugging Jeno gently but firmly out of his seat and ignoring his weak protests. “Enjoy the rest of your lunch, kiddos! I need to talk to this dumbass.”

Jeno’s mouth gapes but doesn’t bother fighting Donghyuck’s iron grip. “What do you mean—”

“Shut your mouth,” he replies cheerfully with gritted teeth, waving goodbye at Jisung and Chenle, who dutifully wave back, faces grave as if attending Jeno’s funeral service.

“I _told_ you,” Jisung says to Jeno smugly, always needing to get the last word in, “I wouldn’t be afraid of Renjun-hyung if I were you.”

“Oh, believe me,” Donghyuck agrees ominously, beginning to drag Jeno away, “Injun is going to be the least of your problems by the time I’m done with you.”

 

*

 

“Remember that time when I said that you were kind of dumb and then Injun said you were dumb as hell?” says Donghyuck. “Well, I don’t know how we were both wrong, but you’re actually the dumbest person on Earth, and I heard that Nana asked if a meter and a yard were the same thing at track last week.”

“Did everyone hear about this besides me?” Jeno wonders out loud, incredulous.

“Even Mark-hyung knows about it, and he’s been dead for almost a year.” Donghyuck shakes his head, rewinding. “Stop trying to get me off track. What the hell, Jeno?”

They had always been more or less the same height as each other but they were currently crammed into Donghyuck’s territory, the tiny old choir room that was supposed to be closed for renovations but that Donghyuck somehow had the key to. Jeno didn’t know why, didn’t want to know how, and wasn’t about to ask.

Here, in his home base, felt as though Donghyuck towered over him, arms crossed and unimpressed—almost paternal, in way, like he was about to say something like—

“You know what, I’m not even mad anymore. I’m just disappointed,” he recites solemnly, perfectly mimicking Mark at his most paternal. “I was _pissed_ —” Donghyuck slams the top of the old, creaky piano for emphasis, which makes Jeno yelp in surprise “—when I left you a voicemail that _specifically_ —” Another unexpected slam “—told me to call me back and you didn’t, but hey. What can you do.”

Then Donghyuck eyes him hard, as if daring him to even think about talking back.

“Uh… I could’ve called you back,” Jeno flounders.

“I mean I _guess_ ,” he says, so textbook passive aggressive that it’s actually admirable. “But you were probably too busy having a quarter life crisis about love or whatever to remember that you have friends. That’s why we, the Committee, have decided that you, Lee Jeno, are in need of some tough love.”

Jeno blinks. He has no idea where to start unpacking this.

“I—what committee is this?”

“The _Committee_ ,” repeats Donghyuck, somehow managing to enunciate the capitalization. “It’s the Jeno Lee is a Dumbass and Really Needs to Get Beat Up Committee.”

“So this is just you and Injun, right?” Jeno says slowly.

Donghyuck shrugs. “Who else? Mark is dead—”

“Mark-hyung is not dead, I literally just got a text from him yesterday.”

“ _Wow_ , oh my god, amazing, so spooky, you got a text from his ghost—honestly, grow the hell up, Jeno, you’re acting like no one in the history of Earth has ever gotten a message from the afterlife before,” Donghyuck dismisses him immediately, to Jeno’s complete bewilderment. “But it’s not Jisung, he’s never even looked anyone in the eyes.”

“Wait, no, hold on, what did you mean about ghosts messaging—”

“And not Chenle, either. Like, he loves you but not that much.”

“I’m—first of all, Chenle… fine, but Hyuck, you have got to go back to the ghost thing—”

“And it can’t be Jaemin,” Donghyuck bulldozes on, “because he—”

“Hates me,” Jeno finishes quietly.

This apparently could not have been further from being the answer Donghyuck was looking for. Jeno can tell because Donghyuck instantly loses his characteristic wry smile and goes a bit red in the face, as if he were merely a single stupid sentiment away from exploding from frustration.

“You really think Jaemin hates you?” Donghyuck asks in total disbelief. “What for? Newsflash, Jeno, there is literally nothing you could do that would ever change his opinion of you. He could never hate you.”

“You don’t know what I did,” Jeno says, looking at the floor. “I ruined our friendship.”

“How?” he challenges, frowning irritably. “You aren’t listening to me. I’m telling you, short of actually physically, like, murdering his family, there is nothing you could do to ruin your friendship with him.” He exhales forcefully. “What do you think you did?”

Jeno hesitates.

“I realized,” he admits slowly, “that I like him. I like him a lot—so much, and I just—”

“Get a grip,” Donghyuck says, though not unkindly. “People like people all the time. You’re not special. Big deal.”

“No, but it _is_ a big deal!” he exclaims, frustrated. “You don’t get it at all! You have no idea what it feels like. I was so selfish about my feelings and tried to project them onto him and it’s all my fault that—I just shouldn’t have assumed in the first place, but I did, and—and I wouldn’t even blame him if he hates me now. Why would he ever like me back?” he finishes on a desperate note.

Emotionally drained and feeling absolutely miserable, Jeno slumps down onto the piano bench.

There’s a hesitant pause before Donghyuck follows, sliding in next to him, his presence oddly comforting even after Jeno’s outburst. For a moment, Donghyuck doesn’t say anything or even look at him, but he puts an arm around his shoulders.

“You’re right, Jeno. You _are_ selfish,” Donghyuck says sternly. “You’re being so selfish right now.”

Jeno feels his arms cross defensively on their own accord but otherwise doesn’t respond.

“But you know what’s so funny?” he continues. “It’s that you’re usually so self-sacrificial. You always put everyone else before yourself.” Donghyuck pokes at his moon boot. “You broke your actual leg trying to protect Jaemin. Like straight out of a drama, damn. And you kept refusing me and Injun’s help at first, too.”

“You two were smothering me,” Jeno says with a tiny, reluctant smile.

Donghyuck snorts softly. “Look… remember last summer when me and—ugh, whatever, you know what happened last summer. But you let me rant to you, any time I wanted, all hours of the day, even though you looked like you were going to strangle me every time.”

“It was no different from every other time I’ve wanted to strangle you,” he says, shrugging.

“No, listen up, asshole, I’m trying to say something nice,” Donghyuck quips lightly. “You’re the best friend ever, Jeno. You don’t think Jisung and Chenle are evil bratty monsters. You actually _like_ going up on the rooftop and indulging in Injun’s sentimental mood swings. You put up with me most of the time,” he adds wryly, but sobers quickly. “But you’re not considering Jaemin or his side of the story at all right now, and you can’t even see it.”

Jeno frowns for a second but eventually returns Donghyuck’s one-armed hug with fervor. Donghyuck fiercely tightens their embrace.

“I know Injun and I are like…” He trails off, briefly pulling away from their hug to make some vague motion with his hand.

“The worst people in the world?” Jeno suggests dryly.

This earns him a slap on his back. “As I was saying, Injun and I can be kind of aggressive but we can’t stand seeing you like this, all mopey all the time. It breaks both of our shriveled up hearts. Injunie cried yesterday at lunch when you weren’t there.”

“Really?”

Donghyuck guffaws. “No, dude, why would he do that?”

A sudden gust of bravery sails through Jeno and he goes for the big, burning question on his mind, partly as a distraction but mostly out of unbearable curiosity.

“So, like,” he begins delicately, “what exactly is the, uh, tea?”

Donghyuck just squints at him.

“Like, you know. The hot goss?”

“What the hell?” Donghyuck says, pulling away from the hug in confusion. “Who are you and what have you done with Jeno?”

Jeno gives up. “Fine, I’ll just come out and say it. What is going on between you and Injun?”

A lesser man would’ve fallen for Donghyuck’s blank-faced _Who, me?_ look, but Jeno has seen that exact same face in the art room that one day with Renjun, and also about another fifty billion times other than that. Donghyuck also seems to remember that they are, in fact, actually friends, because his innocent face morphs into a scowl.

“Fine, you caught us,” he says begrudgingly. “Injun and I have been trying to set you up together.”

“What? Me and Jaemin?” Jeno asks, stunned.

“No, we were trying to set you and Mark-hyung’s ghost up together,” Donghyuck says in a mocking voice. “ _Yes_ , dummy, you and Jaemin.”

“Honestly, I wouldn’t mind being set up with Mark-hyung’s ghost,” Jeno blurts out.

The vaguely grossed out look from Donghyuck stops Jeno from saying anything else about ghosts, Mark’s or otherwise. “Uh, I mean,” Jeno continues, “are you sure? Like, there seems to be something more.”

Donghyuck hesitates, taking a moment to play with the pedals on the piano, before admitting, “Ugh, okay, alright, yeah. We also may or may not have had a bet.”

This wasn’t what Jeno was expecting but he presses on. “Isn’t betting illegal?”

“Well, I thought that being this dumb was illegal, too, so it’s really a miracle that no one’s arrested you yet. But this bet isn’t illegal. It’s not for money. Besides, it’s like what I always say: gossiping is a victimless crime.”

“First of all, gossiping is not a crime,” Jeno points out amusedly. “Secondly, there are victims. Also, you have literally never ever said that.”

“How in the world is that possible?” Donghyuck demands, ignoring the last bit. “Name one victim of gossiping. You can’t.”

“It’s the people you gossip about. _I’m_ your victim.”

“How can you be a victim if there’s no crime?”

Jeno stops to think about this, then curses, Donghyuck’s cackling laughter taunting him.

“I truly hate you, Lee Donghyuck,” he says. “And tell Huang Renjun I hate him, too, actually. Don’t you guys have anything better to do than to gossip about me?”

Donghyuck huffs. “If you think for one second that all Injun and I do is talk about you behind your back, then you’re dead wrong, Lee Jeno. Because we _also_ talk about Na Jaemin behind _his_ back, too. _Additionally_ ,” he adds, “we both have a crippling addiction to gambling, so that explains our bet.”

“Ugh. The literal two worst people on the planet.”

Donghyuck places a hand over his heart, as if genuinely touched. “Hey, man, thanks. That means a lot.”

Jeno gently peels the hand away, relinquishing him from his farcical pose. “Whatever, just tell me about the bet.”

“I can’t go into detail. Very hush-hush. It’s on a need-to-know basis and you don’t need to know.” Off of Jeno’s peeved face, he continues, “But basically Injun said you two weren’t that stupid. Boy was he wrong. I don’t think Injun’s ever been this wrong in his entire life.” Donghyuck rubs his hands together. “Thank you, Jeno, I can’t wait to get rich.”

“You just said the bet wasn’t for money.” He pauses. “Also, don’t go around betting against me!”

“Whatever. It’s the principle of it,” he insists. “I’m going to make him kiss me on the cheek à la you.”

“Just a kiss on the cheek?” Jeno repeats, suspicious.

“Or maybe I should make him kiss five people on the cheek,” Donghyuck amends, seemingly not understanding what Jeno was implying. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“As in kiss five people _including_ you or five people _not including_ you?”

“Why would I make Injun kiss five people other than me?”

Even more baffled at the state of their relationship than when he began, Jeno gives up ever finding out and says a short prayer for Donghyuck’s demise at Renjun’s hand in his head.

Donghyuck absentmindedly steps on the pedals a few more times before going to cuddling up against Jeno again. Out of all his friends, Donghyuck was the one who was most like an overgrown house cat, both in temperament and disposition, and quite possibly needed a set amount of hours of cuddling to survive.

He would be lying if he said it didn’t feel nice to have Donghyuck’s warm, comforting presence draped over him. He was the buoy that kept him from diving into the deep end out of pure despair. The empty choir room seemed as though it was on a separate plane of existence from any other space in the school, calm and quiet, keeping his thoughts swimming around and around.

In his head, Jeno backtracks through everything Donghyuck said. He had to have been in cahoots with Jaemin while Jeno hid for two days, but he was also incredibly sneaky about never confirming or denying someone else’s feelings.

“It’s true what they say, isn’t it,” Jeno posits. “That your meanest friends just want what’s best for you.”

“Buddy, I want you to win the goddamn lottery,” he says, patting Jeno’s back. “The _love_ lottery.”

“No,” vetoes Jeno immediately. “Never say the words ‘love lottery’ ever again.”

“Why not? You’re not the boss of me, Jeno Lee.”

Jeno smiles and slowly disentangles himself from Donghyuck’s arms. Donghyuck, who was such a champion cuddler it would make any cephalopod green with envy, reluctantly lets go him and leans back on the piano.

“What am I supposed to do now, Hyuck?” Jeno asks quietly. “How do I undo what I did?”

“You can’t,” Donghyuck says sympathetically. “But you can always talk to him.”

“That’s the most Injun thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Stop deflecting, I can see straight through you,” he says without heat, but Jeno flinches guiltily anyway. “Talk to him tonight.”

“Tonight?” he objects.

“Did I stutter? You don’t want this to marinate over the weekend, right?”

“But what if he—”

“He won’t.”

“There has to be some other—” Jeno tries to say just for old time’s sake.

“Nuh-uh, just say yes,” Donghyuck advises in a playful sing-song, grinning cheekily. “Trust me, you’ll never win this argument.”

Jeno laughs. “Right. The Committee.”

“We know where you live, Jeno.”

 _Ridiculous_ , Jeno thinks, but it doesn’t stop his heart from overflowing with warmth—although part of that might have been Donghyuck hugging him within an inch of his life.

“Are you hugging me or trying to smother me?” he asks but returns the embrace.

“I’m not sure,” Donghyuck mumbles into Jeno’s shoulder, squeezing even tighter. “You know I love you, Jeno, even if you’re an ungrateful blind dummy.”

“Ridiculous,” Jeno says out loud this time, to Donghyuck’s amusement, “but like, thanks, you’re not completely repulsive, you’re a good friend, where would I be without you, love you too or something or whatever.”

He pauses to reevaluate his entire life but decides that it’s alright. Jeno kisses Donghyuck very chastely on the cheek and bolts as fast as he can out of the choir room without re-injuring himself, roaring with laughter as Donghyuck screeches behind him, “Jeno! I’m telling Nana! Jeno, does this mean you’re gonna start being weird around me, too! I know it’s hard but you shouldn’t fall for me! The Committee was formed for—Jeno Lee, come back here! _Jeno!_ ”

 

*

 

The rest of his classes pass by imperceptibly as if he were in a fugue state, the hours a lingering ghost long after the school day had ended and the weekend had begun. There was something otherworldly about the river at this time of day—quiet and hypnotic, the water imbued setting-sun-red, swollen from all the rain in the past week.

Jeno isn’t quite sure how long he had sat there, gazing blankly at the current as it streamed through. Long enough that his old nylon track bottoms were soaked with dew and the non-booted foot he dangled in the water was beginning to prune rather unattractively. Long enough that the overwhelming, deadened-heart, jittery panic that gripped him after he sent Jaemin the text had all but melted away. His head felt both empty and crammed full with thoughts at the same time, pulled taut in the in-between.

A familiar bike bell cuts through the dull roar of the river. It was a sound that Jeno’s heard a million times before but it still renders him breathless, and his heart pounds in his ears in time to footsteps treading softly across the grassy riverbank, stopping right next to him.

“Hey,” Jaemin says quietly. “Can I sit?”

Jeno cranes his neck to look up at him. There Jaemin was, backlit, just-washed hair from practice. The sun swept along his face, which was carefully schooled into a blank expression, neither open nor closed.

“Sure, Nana,” says Jeno. “I asked you to come in the first place.”

Jaemin exhales a short little huff of air, not quite laughter, but it was still better than nothing. He toes off his running shoes and gracefully folds himself into a sitting position, dipping his feet into the water a few inches away from Jeno.

Neither of them say a word or glance at each other, both opting to stare at the current instead, until—

“Nope, it’s wet,” Jaemin realizes with a note of growing horror. “The grass is wet. My entire ass is wet right now.”

Jeno can’t control the laugh at escapes him then, shattering the tense atmosphere in a single supremely unattractive snort. It’s just about the ugliest laugh he had ever heard come out of his mouth—maybe the ugliest laugh he had ever heard in his entire life, and that was saying something, having grown up with both Donghyuck _and_ Mark.

“Don’t laugh. Stop laughing. Why are you laughing?” Jaemin protests, shoving his shoulder lightly.

“I’m not laughing!” Jeno insists, choking slightly on another burst of laughter.

“How could this happen to me?” Jaemin moans. He stands up abruptly, stepping into the shallows, the movement splashing even more river water onto his legs. Makes to sit back down, bending his knees an inch. Thinks better of it and stands back upright. “How aren’t you wet? Why aren’t you wet?” he says, bending up and down again, then repeats, “How could this happen to me?"

“Don’t worry, I feel like I’ve been sitting on Shrek’s house for a few hours now,” Jeno says in the best comforting tone he can manage but fails to hold in another snort-laugh.

“ _On_ his house?” Jaemin repeats in clear belief, standing straight again.

“He lives in a swamp,” Jeno supplies unhelpfully, finally getting his breathing back under control.

Jaemin gapes for a second. “You let me sit in mud,” he accuses.

“I’m really sorry, Nana,” he apologizes sincerely. “I’ll do your laundry.”

“Now both of us have swamp ass. Is this what you wanted? Swamp ass? Are you happy now?”

“Please no,” says Jeno, in agony at the phrasing, now incredibly aware of how muddy the bottom of his own pants were. “Please never say ‘swamp ass’ ever again.”

“ _Swamp ass_ ,” Jaemin repeats with a twinkle in his eye, drawing every syllable out on purpose as if he wanted Jeno to be tortured for as long as possible. It was fair and somewhat reasonable, Jeno supposed, since he had just put Jaemin on read for two agonizing days.

“Oh, god,” he pleads, thinking of Mark’s very-much-still-alive spirit. “I’m begging you, Nana.”

He shrugs. “Then beg.”

“I should’ve warned you,” he tries but finds that he can’t keep the grin off his face. “It was my fault. I let you sit down.”

“Not good enough,” Jaemin evaluates in a lilting tone that echoed Jeno’s smile. “Try again.”

“I should’ve pushed you into the river before you could sit,” Jeno amends.

“That’s just mean, Jeno.”

“I should’ve asked you if you wanted to move in next to Shrek before you sat in his swamp.”

“And now we’re back to swamp ass,” Jaemin says with his a grin of his own.

It was his smile that did it. “Nana, spare me,” Jeno says, tone light but deliberate, beginning to come to terms with the funny little presence in his heart that both lifted and weighted him down. He wriggles his toes in the water. Bites his lip. Breathes in, out. “I’ll do anything. Please.”

For a moment, Jaemin doesn’t say a word, wading deeper into the shallows. Jeno watches the way his pants billow in the water, drawn downstream. When he finally turns around, a sliver of sun frames his face just right so that the shadows cast from his lashes trail down his cheek, and Jeno can’t help but trace that path over and over again like a prayer, like they held the answer to the question he’d been silently asking all along.

“I really don’t know what you’re doing,” Jaemin says quietly, “and I don’t what you’ve been trying to do. Every time I think I’ve figured you out, you pull back.” He runs a hand through his hair. “It’s been really frustrating. I thought I could read you much better than this because we’re best friends. But that just makes it even worse.”

Jeno shuts his eyes and thinks about everything that had lead up to this very fragment of space and time. The first time they had ever seen each other. Their bike rides. The night stars. Jaemin waiting patiently for him in between classes. The warmth of his back, his hands. Gossiping about Donghyuck and Renjun and finding out that they were gossiping about them right back. The river, _this_ river— _their_ river—and the car crash and waking up in the hospital room to Jaemin’s worried face, his easy laughter, the way he had breezily asked for—

A kiss. He had asked for a kiss, and Jeno had given him one. On the cheek. Sweetly, he might add in his defense. But it was only now that Jeno realizes that that wasn’t what he had meant at all, not really.

“Do you like me?” Jeno asks unsteadily. “Have you liked me all this time and I was just too dense to notice?”

When he opens his eyes, there Jaemin stands before him with a sheepish smile on his face, and Jeno knows.

“You _like_ me. _You_ like _me_ ,” he can’t help but want to confirm, slightly bewildered. “You really like me. Like, _like_ -like me.”

“That was three ‘like's in a row,” Jaemin says, awfully reminiscent of Donghyuck.

“Yes, but why?” Jeno blurts out. “Um—how? How, and why, and how?”

This makes Jaemin laugh. “ _How_ do people like each other?”

“No, I just,” he sputters, faintly aware that his hands were shaking. “I think I’m dumber than I thought I was. Like, I must be as dumb as Donghyuck and Injun say I am. I just,” Jeno says again, shaking his head in disbelief. “I just thought you were just flirting with me this whole time.”

“Jeno,” Jaemin says, raising an eyebrow, “I _was_ flirting with you this whole time. What do you think liking someone means?”

He can feel the tips of his ears start to flush with color, radiating heat onto his face. “But you’re always flirty, Nana. I thought it was just a joke,” he confesses quietly, “or that you were just playing around, and I couldn’t figure it out. I just couldn’t let myself believe that… I thought myself out of it over and over again.” He pauses, watching the water soak through the bottoms of his rolled-up pants and figures that he’s hopeless. To his surprise, he finds that he’s at peace with it. “When?”

Jaemin rakes his fingers through his hair again, deep in thought. “I’ve always liked you, Jeno,” he finally says, simply and honestly, the earnestness on his face maddening and exhilarating all at once. “From the very first moment we met, I knew.” Jaemin hesitates for a split second, then continues, “So? Do you like me too?”

Somewhere inside, Jeno feels the dam he had built around his thoughts crumble. It was the same voice that had once said _What if?_ and _Why not?_ that came flooding in, and every doubt that Jeno ever thought he had was dimmed by its dull roar.

“Yeah, Nana,” he admits, simply and honestly. “I’ve always liked you, too.”

Like a sailor to siren song, the way Jaemin’s face lights up draws Jeno into the river. He gets up, standing on the mossy detritus hugging the bank with a wobbly leg, and Jaemin’s outstretched hand leads his, warm and surreal, guiding him through the current like a lifeline, the North Star.

Gravity, Jeno had come to learn from years of being bored to tears in physics, is the natural phenomena wherein all things come together. It set bodies in motion, masses careening towards the ground. Gravity is the reason Newton found his apple, the reason why things plummet in free fall, reaching terminal velocity, the reason why people fall for each other.

It’s the reason why Jeno slips, his moon boot catching on the slippery edge of a slab of rock. His mind goes blank for a terrifying, heart stopping moment, breath wrenched out of him by that external force. He hears Jaemin’s surprised shout and his hand tighten its grasp on his, but it’s too late, and both of them crash spectacularly into the deepest of the river like sinking skipping stones.

Jeno surfaces, spluttering up and choking on water in what he’s sure is a most attractive manner. He wipes away the river water in his eyes with one hand, Jaemin’s fingers still tightly intertwined in the other. Jaemin himself comes up a second after, looking unfairly beautiful still, even with his hair hanging in drippy strings in his face.

Jaemin pushes his hair off his forehead and laughs. “I just took a shower, too,” he pretends to complain. “At least my pants will get washed, right? Hey, is your leg okay?”

But Jeno doesn’t hear a word he says. This close, treading water, trying his best to keep afloat—all Jeno can see and hear and feel is Jaemin. His bright eyes looking into his, the hypnotic tide of his still-water-running-deep breaths, rhythm so ingrained into the gentle, flowing current that Jeno couldn’t tell if it was the river or him. It didn’t matter, Jeno thinks. Maybe they were one and the same, all-encompassing, the overwhelming weight of their gravities.

This close, Jeno can’t stop looking at Jaemin’s face, a familiar thing made unfamiliar in this perspective.

Hesitantly, Jeno lifts his free hand out of the water and waits for Jaemin to nod, a motion so minute he would have missed it entirely if he hadn’t been staring. Trails his fingers unhurried as raindrops down a windowpane from his brow, the soft curve of his cheek, the sharpness of his chin. Thumb brushing against that wry mouth. Memorizes the pieces of him.

“I’ll do anything,” Jeno whispers again,

“Really?” Jaemin whispers back liltingly, lips curling at the corners. “Anything?”

“Anything,” he promises.

Jaemin pretends to think. Hums deep, the sound reverberating through Jeno’s fingers. “Oh, you know me, I would never ask for much,” he says, going for sensual, but Jeno can see the playful glint in his eyes. “Just a kiss.”

 _Gravity_ , Jeno recites in his head. _Inherent, innate in all masses, the force of that attracts two bodies toward one another._

Jaemin’s hand grazes the nape of Jeno’s neck and gently pulls him in, and their orbits collide. Jeno feels him saturated everywhere—Jaemin’s heated palm cradling the back of his head, his other hand tightening around his under the water, chest to chest. And then his lips press against Jeno’s in a kiss and Jeno’s brain short-circuits, so that if they hadn’t been holding onto each other Jeno feared he might’ve been carried all the way downriver.

The world falls silent but they move their lips to the rhythm of the thump in Jeno’s heart, soft and deep. How was he being drowned and burned alive at the same time? But then Jaemin tugs him closer still and they kiss again and again, and his hand trails from Jeno’s neck down the curve of his spine, slow as sin. It’s both too much and not enough, and Jeno can feel the quiet fire in his heart burst into a star, blooming into an entire galaxy.

Eventually they pull apart. Jeno’s eyes are drawn to Jaemin’s lips before flickering up to his eyes, full of light and joy, and Jeno is acutely aware of how he’s grinning so widely he must look like an idiot. But Jaemin is beaming back looking just as much a fool, and suddenly they’re wrapped together and laughing into each other’s necks, intertwined like they always have been, two inseparable tendrils of light.

“You know what’s really dumb about all this?” Jeno murmurs, close enough to Jaemin’s ear so that he shivers—although, in hindsight, it could’ve been the temperature of the water.

“What’s dumb?” Jaemin whispers back.

“That we could’ve been making out in rivers forever ago. All this time wasted,” he replies with a pout, then pauses. “And also, my toes are definitely pruning.”

“Moodkiller,” he accuses, a grin in his voice.

“It’s payback for ‘swamp ass,’” Jeno claims, trying to frown but his lips refuse to wilt down in that way.

“Thanks for reminding me, I almost forgot about ‘swamp ass,’” Jaemin says gleefully, much to Jeno's chagrin, but they wade up back onto the riverbank anyway, hair and clothes drenched and clinging uncomfortably, Jeno’s moon boot weighing a ton heavier than it had before they fell in.

It’s only much later, after they’ve wrung out as much water as they could from their ruined clothing, after Jeno couldn’t stop himself from pressing another kiss to Jaemin’s lips, after he’s settled back onto the familiar rear rack of Jaemin’s “sexy red old lady”—his unfortunate choice of words—and curling his arms around Jaemin’s waist tightly that Jaemin says, seemingly out of the blue, “I’m glad you fell for me.”

Jeno is not even sure what kind of response he should give.

“Not that—I don’t mean—uh,” he amends, slowing down to a stop and glancing worriedly back at Jeno. Jeno just thinks it’s funny that Jaemin is the one sputtering and stuttering for a change. “I’m not like, trying to brag or—be conceited or anything like—and I’m definitely not glad you broke your leg because of me,” Jaemin adds hastily, beginning to worry at his lip.

He shrugs. “At least I get to do this now.”

Jaemin frowns in confusion. “What do you—”

“Shut up, Nana,” says Jeno, smiling, and kisses him softly, sweetly. He decides he rather likes that dazed, buoyant look on Jaemin when he pulls away. “It’s okay. I know what you mean.”

By then, the sun had already dipped below the horizon and twilight was just touching the rosy orange sky. If Jeno really cared for astronomy, he would have looked up and seen the first scattering of stars peaking through the dusk. If he had paid any attention at all in photography class he had taken last summer only to fulfill his fine art requirement, he would have known that this ambiguous time between the end of one day and the beginning of the next was called the blue hour.

There were so many _If_ ’s. If he read the news more often, he would have known that there were currently more than two thousand satellites up in space, swayed by Earth’s orbit. If he really concentrated on the atmosphere, he would have noticed the rush of the river fade away with each push of the pedal. If he had never broken his leg, he would have probably never even realized he had a crush. If he draped himself closer against Jaemin’s back, he would have heard Jaemin’s heart beat in time with his. If he had never met Jaemin, held him, had him, fallen for him—

Which was kind of a dumb train of thought, Jeno thinks amusedly, feeling Jaemin’s warmth imbue him. The hour paints them rose gold, electric, the enormousness of night dawning upon them. If Jeno had done his physics reading already, he would have known that there is gravity everywhere in the universe. Closing his eyes, resting his heart, he lets himself be pulled into Jaemin’s.

**Author's Note:**

> oh god i hope this was even slightly A LITTLE enjoyable... initially i envisioned this as a short introspective summer vacation slice-of-life and then it turned out to be 1) free of introspection, 2) not a summer vacation fic, and 3) the longest thing i've ever written. i'm not usually this longwinded but uh sorry i can't explain


End file.
